This guide includes short- and long-term strategies you can employ to discourage students from cheating on assessments.
Short-Term Strategies
Inquire about a proctoring service provided by your institution.
- This might be a nice option to add to high-stakes assessments.
Alter settings within the assessments:
- Eliminate backtracking. Do not allow students to go back and change their answers once they have already been submitted.
- Show only one question at a time.
- Randomize/shuffle questions and answers.
- Allow students to take the assessment only once.
- Delay score availability.
- Only allow students to see the correct answers for a short amount of time.
- Once the assessment is closed to the students, allow the answers to be visible. Do not allow students to view their responses.
- Allow students to take an assessment within a 24-hour window only. This could eliminate some collaboration among students.
Add a time limit.
- Note: Be prepared to offer extensions to time limits in order to comply with accessibility best practices.
Adjust point values.
- Provide more points for higher-stakes assessments and fewer, or no, points for lower-stakes assessments.
Long-Term Strategies
Write question banks that include a variety of question types.
Offer different versions of the same assessment.
Write questions that require higher order thinking.