Teaching Tips

Avoiding Cheating in Online Classes:
Suggestions for Assessing Student Learning

Faculty who have not taught online often ask about cheating.  Specifically, they ask how you know the person who is taking the class is the one who signed up.  Faculty who have taught online report that if someone wanted to assume another’s identity and take the entire course, there would be no way of knowing that.  But they also point out that if Bill walked into your classroom and said he was Sam and came to every class, there also would be no way to know that. 

Faculty do worry about cheating, both in online classes and onground.  Those who have taught online have made a series of suggestions about how to make cheating less likely:

• Make it clear to your students in your introduction or syllabus that cheating and plagiarism are not tolerated in your class and what the penalties are.  Have links to sites which clearly describe plagiarism and show students how to cite correctly when they use other’s words or ideas.
• Require and grade active and frequent participation in the course conversation (threaded discussion).  Faculty, who have students write weekly, comment that they know their online students and their work very well, in some cases better than they know their onground students.  If students write continually, it makes it easy to spot the occasion when someone else might have written something for them.  Many faculty have contributions to the course conference count for anywhere from 25% to 90% of the final grade depending how they use the conference.
• Use multiple choice, short answer, and matching tests for ungraded self-assessment.  This will help students see what information and/or concepts they have learned and which they need to spend more time mastering.  These tests are easy to create in most course management systems, but hard to monitor.  There’s no need to monitor them for cheating if they are used in this way.
• Assume all tests you create are open book tests.  As one professor said, “In the real world, people are not asked to perform on the job without any available references.”  Open book tests ask students to use higher order thinking skills.
• Some math professors, who do use exams, send everyone the same exam, but with the numbers changed slightly on each one.
• Many online faculty use case studies, research papers, and projects as their major means of assessing learning.
• If you are assigning research papers or projects, assign them in chunks due over several weeks.  Ask for the topic or thesis one week, literature search – with annotated references—the next week, then methodology and preliminary findings, a rough draft, and then a final draft.  It is less likely that students will deconstruct a paper that they find on the web to meet these requirements.  It also ensures that students understand what they are being asked to do and don’t wait until the last minute to do it.
• Some faculty suggestions for project based assessments that work in online classes: 
  the student must:
  • construct a web site
  • develop a data base designed to do X
  • create a plan to end homelessness
  • find an appropriate web sites on the web which would help other students understand the context in which a writer worked (the sites must be posted and no site may be duplicated).
  • Explain how they solve a particular problem

We'd love to hear your suggestions for good online assessments.  If you have suggestions, please email them to Diane Goldsmith at Dgoldsmith@ctdlc.org and let us know if we can use your name as the originator of the idea.