Prevent Cheating in Online Courses

Inevitably anyone who wants to cheat is going to find a way to do so, be it for an online course or in a normal classroom setting. While it cannot be completely controlled, you do have some strategies available to you that decreases the likelihood of cheating, or at least discourages it by making life a bit more difficult. Prevent cheating with Courseplay today!

Cheating can take many forms, but the majority of people will look to cheat on a quiz, especially an online quiz. Many educators and edtech administrators find this to be challenging, but there are some steps you can take to limit the amount of cheating that takes place.

Ultimately it comes down to your quizzing mechanism. Many learning management systems have a built-in quiz feature, but it is rather stale, relying upon old quizzing principles that lack true effectiveness when it comes to managing the degree of cheating. Below are some strategies you can use to make life difficult for cheaters:

  1. Question Type Variation: Stay away from any product that only has simple quizzing abilities. If you can only administer true/false questions and some multiple choice, then you should expect a high degree of cheating. You need multiple choice, true and false, matching, sorting, fill-in-the-blank, answer randomizing, and more.
  2. Question Formation: Most questions consist of a line of text and then text answers, but if you are able to include video or audio in your questions/answer, then you are one step ahead of the game. This makes it a bit more challenging for someone to take a screenshot of the questions.
  3. Question Bank: In no case whatsoever should you use a quiz that does not have a question bank. This is by far the easiest way to prevent cheating, and any system that does not have question bank facilities is simply behind the times. Create a robust list of questions and then delivery a random portion of them to your users – no two quizzes will be the same.
  4. Time Limit for Quiz: Setting a timer on a quiz is a great way to keep test takers under pressure and keep them from leaving the page to look for answers to their questions. The more accurate the timer is, the less time students have to look around for answers.

With Courseplay you can do all these things and more. Request a free trial of Courseplay today to learn about how we prevent cheating in online quizzes using education technology.

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