This is the 8th in a series of blogs on assessment, which forms part of a larger series of blogs on the importance of starting strong in higher education and how academics can facilitate it.
LOOKING TO MINIMISE PLAGIARISM IN AN ONLINE ASSESSMENT?
When setting an online assessment, the fear of plagiarism is strong, despite the reality that the amount of online cheating doesn’t seem to be any different to the amount of cheating in face to face settings. But we still want to avoid it as much as possible. So, how can we ensure that students are submitting their own work?
- Be explicit about the damage plagiarism does. There is a lot of information for students about plagiarism and how they can avoid it here. Similarly, there is a lot of information for staff here, including an overview of using Turnitin here.
- Design assignments that build in difficulty incrementally. Supporting the building of their knowledge base will facilitate student success in assignments. Once motivation and schemata are established, students’ perceptions of assignments will change. I write about the way to avoid online proctoring here.
- USE TECH: set assessment in Canvas for a specific time and use questions banks and formula randomization.
By setting it for a specific time (see below for how to do this), you prevent students seeing the assessment before it goes ‘live’. The opportunity for exchanging information with others is reduced, as is the ability to source answers from the internet. Of course, students may still chat with each other during the assessment window, but this practice will tend to self-penalize as their time to complete the assessment will be shorter having spent valuable time conferring with others.
The design of the assessment then is critical – if you overestimate the time it should take, you will open up time for conferring. It may be better to set shorter assessments that students will only complete in the given time if they know the content. If you take this path, it is important to explicitly tell the students that the assessment is difficult in terms of time – an unsuccessful student tends to give up more easily if there appears to be a randomness to achievement.
HOW TO SET AN ASSESSMENT FOR A SPECIFIED TIME
STEP 1 – add an assignment and choose Turnitin as the submission type (for heavy text-based assignments). Select “External Tool” and then find “Turnitin”
Step 2 – Choose the relevant time to make the test open to students.
USING CANVAS QUESTION BANKS
Question banks help to randomise the questions a student receives. If you have 10 questions in the bank and you only assign 6 to the exam, then you can mitigate the chances that students will receive the same questions. A student trying to cheat will soon realise that their questions are different to their friends. Of course, not all of them will be, but the student who sees that several of them aren’t is less likely to bother as it is taking too long to find out what questions match and which ones don’t.
USING CANVAS FORMULA QUESTIONS
I will be posting here shortly a video demonstrating the fantastic application of the formula question in Canvas, a question that essentially allows you to change the variables in a question containing numbers so that multiple possibilities can be generated. This practically means that each student will receive a different question, but of the same difficulty level, rendering it still a valid and equitable assessment. So if John decides to call up Mary during the assessment and ask what she got for question 5, it will be pointless as Mary has a different question – the answers simply won’t match.
FINAL THOUGHTS
Everyone likes to succeed. This is why some students plagiarise. Careful design of assessment that incrementally builds student knowledge and confidence will TEACH students to get better at assessment. This, together with explicit discussions about it, will help many students steer clear of plagiarism.
In the next post I will discuss how modified online examinations shouldn’t necessarily try to completely emulate traditional examinations using technology.
I’m Paul Moss. I’m a learning designer. Follow me @edmerger
LEARNING DESIGN by Paul G Moss 