Students taking quizzes for other students?

[hottingert]

I was talking to a colleague of mine and he brought up an interesting question/issue.  He was talking to another dad whose daughter, currently in middle school, was taking tests for other students and getting paid for it.

Now that is the extent of my knowledge of what is going on.  I don't know what platform the middle school is using and I don't know how this student is accomplishing this.  I am hoping more details will be forth coming.

This started an interesting conversation.  Can someone do this through Canvas?  Usernames and passwords can be easily shared by students.  I suppose if the quiz was taken outside of the classroom that it would be possible.  I know that there can be preventative measures taken to limit attempts on quizzes but Canvas doesn't know that the person entering credentials is that person.

If a middle school student is already doing this, again I don't know what platform, do we think this has been attempted by a student using Canvas in high school? in college?

Thoughts?

[ysmalls · Accepted solution]

Hi hottingert,

Well if the quiz is open and the students are allowed to take the test from outside the school then I can totally see them doing this at any level but I believe it's the same as if students were given a written quiz to take home. 

I do know that most of our teachers use the filtering options for quizzes so that it included the following:

• Access Code
• IP Addresses
• Available From
• Due (time)
• Issued by period (secondary)

Students need to meet the specific criteria set in order to access the quiz.

So if a teacher want's the students to take a quiz at home and want's to minimize cheating they can also set the quiz to be taken from 6:00pm to 7:00pm on a given date and give it a time limit of 1 hour that way all students will need to be logged in at a specific time to take the quiz and will have limited time to take it and teacher sets up the criteria.

Hope these suggestions help.

[Chris_Hofer]

hottingert...

You might want to take a look at  @kona ‌' document called Quiz Settings to Maximize Security...as it may be of help.

[kmeeusen]

Hi hottingert‌

This is very prevalent.  This quote from the US National Library of Medicine, National Institute of Health states, 

The prevalence of self-reported cheating was found to be 19.8% (95% CI = 17.4-21.9). About 12.1% (95% CI = 10.2-13.9) of students disclosed cheating on the entrance examination. The majority of students (80.1% (95% CI = 77.9-82.3) disclosed that they would not report cheating to invigilators even if they had witnessed cheating. 

I am both a fully online instructor in Higher Ed and a Canvas Admin, and what I often see and experience are Exam Parties where several students will meet in a library or  someone's home and all log-in and take the tests together, or accessing Google or some other internet search on their PC or mobile device, and every other trick in the book.

 @kona ‌' document referenced by Chris Hofer above is a great start to ensuring online testing security, so are the various lock-down browser solutions (our school uses Respondus Lockdown Browser/Monitor), or web-based proctoring solutions such as Canvas Partner ProctorU, or using an on-ground proctoring center. However, nothing is 100%! Cheaters cheat, and cheaters are quite creative in finding ways to do so. My office partner and I just found a web site that will write your thesis or dissertation for you for a price. I think it is a sign of our get ahead at any price society where ever our leaders and celebrities lie about degrees and military service. Many years ago when I was a young man on Kodiak Island in Alaska, we contracted with a company to build a new container ship cargo dock with massive cranes on the dock. Their engineer had a fake degree.

While I take precautions, I refuse to obsess about it. According to the stats I shared, 80% of my students are honest (80/20 rule, again?). The rest I could care less about. Except for the few very amazing examples like my dock-builder and Frank Abagnale, most cheaters are found out after the first couple weeks on the job, and will spend the rest of their lives in and out of unemployment lines because they did not learn.

My job is to teach and facilitate learning, but the actual learning can only be done by the student.

[ysmalls]

Hello,

We have looked at Respondus but it currently will not work with quizzes.next or Gauge.

[swilson34]

Any measures you can take can be foiled by students, they are a creative bunch. I was surprised to read about "exam parties"!!!

This is one reason why projects and lab are a better evaluation tool, quizzes are good to review but the instructor needs to build in some other harder assessments. We do make ProctorU available to our instructors but at the moment we don't have a lot of traffic with it. 

We had a case in a face to face course where a student signed up for a course, but his friend was the guy who showed up for class. He took the tests and everything. I'm not sure how he was caught, but that's pretty bold!