Ensuring the Academic Integrity of Online Assessments

The role of anxiety in cheating

The research suggests that most students cheat because of anxiety stemming from two factors: their perception of the role the assessment will play in their grade and their sense of their own preparation for the assessment. If a single assessment is worth a large portion of their final grade, students may decide it is safer to cheat than to perform poorly when the stakes are so high. In addition, if students don’t feel they’ve had enough preparation for an assessment, they will be tempted to take shortcuts. As instructors, we can lower the likelihood of cheating by using some simple strategies to lower student anxiety. 

Reduce student anxiety by helping students explore the purpose and value of the assessment.

When students are anxious, they stop thinking clearly about assessments and simply see them as difficult hoops to jump through—in any way they can. On the other hand, students will value the work of an assessment when they see that this work will help them academically and in the real world. The challenge is that they don’t always realize that the kinds of challenges our assessments present will prepare them for new experiences in their own lives. This means that we must take the time to communicate the value of the assessment and make time for students to articulate this value to themselves. For example, you can help them see that their final essay is similar to the kinds of writing they may need to do in their future career or that the exercises they will complete are a key to success in the fields they are interested in.   

Reduce student anxiety by acknowledging that assessments have their limitations.  

When students become anxious about the weight and perceived meaning of assessments, they are not only tempted to take shortcuts, they may also underperform due to that anxiety, even if they are not cheating! There are two messages that work well to lower students’ anxiety about assessments.  

The first message you should send to students is that the assessment is one component of your grading scheme and that they have completed other components that are already built into their grade. This can help them put an assessment into the larger picture of all their efforts in your course and make it seem less overwhelming. To give this message more meaning, it’s worth reviewing the different components that make up final grades with students so that they can contextualize their final assessment as one of several assessments.

The second message you should send to students is that you are aware that any assessment can only measure so much: no assessment is a perfect measure of their learning. Communicate to students that while you want them to try their best, you realize that the assessment can’t show you everything that they know and understand. It can be very calming for students to approach an assessment as one measure of their learning rather than seeing it as a definitive diagnosis of their abilities. To give this message more meaning, consider allowing students an opportunity to describe three things they learned in the course that they weren’t able to demonstrate on the assessment so that they have a place to show you their learning in ways that your assessment may not capture. You might also allow students to retake a certain number of items or revise some aspect of the assessment. All these practices help students see your assessment as a form of learning, not a sink-or-swim component of their grade.

Reduce student anxiety by providing ample time on online exams. 

If your assessment is an exam, Brightspace provides settings that help reduce student anxiety and that can help students feel less tempted to share their exam with other students.  

To reduce student anxiety, make your exam available for a span of time that is much longer than the time they will actually spend taking the exam. This allows students to access the exam and take it when they are able. You can still set a time limit for the exam (e.g., 90 minutes or 2 hours): Brightspace allows you to set a timer so that students see the time that they have to complete the exam but are not timed out if they exceed that time. These two settings give students flexibility within parameters and will lower anxiety. Another way to lower anxiety is to break a longer test into two or three sections and allow students to work on one section at a time. 

If you are concerned about students sharing the exam with other students or taking the exam together, there are two helpful options in Brightspace. You can create a pool of questions in Brightspace from which tests can be formed: in this way, each student is taking a different but parallel exam. A simpler version of this approach is to randomize questions when you set up your exam so that students all answer the same questions but in a different order. 

With both these logistical considerations you should communicate with students about why you have used these settings. Sharing your understanding that students are stressed and that you want to reduce that stress and reduce the temptation to short-circuit their own learning experience helps them understand that your approach to assessment isn’t about “catching” them but rather supporting them.

Reduce student anxiety by giving open-book exams.

Given the worries that students have when they take any exam, we can understand that the temptation to reference their textbook and notes while taking an online exam is often too strong to resist. It’s helpful to recognize that students will likely take any online assessment with these kinds of supports at hand, and it is also helpful to recognize that they and we can work with this reality productively. 

One productive response in this situation is to write exam questions that can’t be answered by simply looking in a textbook, at notes, or the internet: better questions are ones that require students to apply principles and processes they’ve learned to novel problems and scenarios. Another productive response is to ask students to explain how they arrived at an answer: this ensures that students have to show their thinking even if they consulted other sources (or a classmate!) to choose an answer. Finally, your students may actually end up doing more learning if you tell them to spend some time using their book, their notes, and conversations with classmates to clarify their thinking about a complex problem or an essay prompt: let them prepare ahead of time and then challenge them to synthesize that preparation in their individual response. That kind of preparation ensures that your final assessment requires review and consolidation of learning, which is the value of an open-book exam. 

The role of assessment design in cheating

We don’t always realize it, but while we may be trying to reduce student anxiety using some of the strategies we discussed above, some aspects of our assessment design may work against us and make it more likely for students to cheat! We know that when students feel unprepared for an assessment, that feeling can lead them into temptation. Similarly, when students feel an assessment is not worth preparing for, they may feel cheating is justified. Let’s explore some small changes to our assessment plan and design that build a sense of preparation and self-efficacy to fortify students’ resolve to use our assessments for their learning honestly. We offer four key strategies here and provide examples.

Use more frequent, low-stakes assessments.  

When students believe that a single assessment or assignment will determine their success or failure in a course, they may decide it is safer to cheat than to risk a low grade. Instead of a midterm and final exam being large determinants of students’ grades, consider smaller, more frequent assessments that carry less weight for students’ final average.  

Help students prepare for assessments—and understand how that preparation is helping them.  

Students who do not feel well-prepared for an assessment or believe that an assessment is unfair will be anxious, and this will make them more likely to cheat. As you design course activities, make sure that there are multiple opportunities for students to practice using the skills your assessments require, and explicitly communicate the value of that practice to them. Remind them before assessments that they have spent time practicing what they need to succeed on the exam, paper, or project.  

It’s wise to communicate the preparatory steps that you’ve planned as an instructor in your syllabus, but you can also point out to students throughout the course how the work that they are doing is iterative and builds toward the work of your assessments. 

Create assessments that require students to do more than recall information.  

If our assessments do little more than require students to memorize information, they may wonder if it is worth engaging honestly with a test or exam. Information is something they have easy access to, so they may feel justified offloading what feels like a meaningless task to search engines and artificial intelligence. Creating test items that challenge students to use their knowledge or understanding is one way to make cheating more difficult and less attractive. When students see that you are asking them to use what they know and explain how they have used it, they will dig into the work and are more likely to see its value. 

Communicate your assessment design to students thoughtfully.

Students are savvy and aware of tools that can help them with assessments. Students can use free shortcuts like AI or hire out others to take or write their assessments. Creating assessments that are very specific to your course and the goals that you have for student learning makes it more difficult for students to use others’ work in lieu of their own. Answers to and examples of such assessments can’t be easily found online. Let students know that the items on the exam are not from a test bank. Inform them that the papers and projects you’ve created are unique not just to your course, but to this iteration of your course. This is another opportunity to frame the assessment as a meaningful and manageable measure of their thinking and learning, rather than an ordeal meant to tax them stressfully. Below are some examples of how you can communicate your assessment design.

Resources

Lang, J. M. (2013). Cheating lessons: Learning from academic dishonesty. Harvard University Press.

McCabe, D. L., Butterfield, K. D., & Treviño, L. K. (2017). Cheating in college: Why students do it and what educators can do about it. Johns Hopkins University Press.

Nilson, L. B. (2017). Online Teaching at its Best. Jossey-Bass.

Winkelmas, M., Boye, A., & Tapp, S. (Eds.). (2019). Transparent design in higher education teaching and leadership: A guide to implementing the transparency framework institution-wide to improve learning and retention. Stylus.