What Should You Do To Avoid Cheating In Online Classes?

It’s common to study and develop abilities online, yet cheating is an issue that must be addressed. Due to inadequate supervision, easy access to material, and a lack of understanding of academic integrity regulations, preventing cheating in online courses can be challenging.

For a variety of reasons, including the necessity to earn a certain grade or the pressure to succeed, cheating happens in online courses. It may also occur because students are unaware of the repercussions or are ignorant of the rules governing academic integrity.

To prevent cheating, there must be clear communication about academic integrity policies, effective monitoring and detection methods, and proactive efforts to prevent cheating. Educators, parents, and learners must work together to uphold academic integrity.

Allowing cheating can have serious consequences, such as an inaccurate assessment of learners’ abilities and damage to credibility. While there’s no guaranteed solution to this problem, taking proactive steps can help reduce cheating and maintain academic integrity. Let’s start to know what should you do to avoid cheating in online classes.

How to Avoid Cheating In Online Classes

Here are some of the methods to avoid cheating in online classes:

Utilize a variety of questions

Avoid using only true or false or multiple choice questions on an exam; instead, incorporate open-ended questions. With open-ended questions, it is more challenging for students to respond verbatim as their peers did, and they would be obliged to justify their answers with particular facts and narratives that are exceptional to their own comprehension of the course contents.

Establish a culture of intellectual integrity

Fairness, learning, credibility protection, and the development of personal integrity are all guaranteed by academic integrity. Make sure students first comprehend what cheating is and why it is improper. To keep students accountable, you might include this in your first lesson and need them to sign off that they have read and comprehended the policy. Consider incorporating a discussion board where students may debate the reasons why they believe cheating occurs and the potential repercussions. When it’s exposed, it will seem socially undesirable.

Offer different versions of the same test

In order to reduce the likelihood that students taking the exam in the same physical location would all get the same questions, it is advised to have many copies of the same test available.

Design problems that need introspection

When you’re supposed to write from personal experience, it’s difficult to cheat. Invite students to respond to a question using examples from their own experiences. This is applicable to more than just writing and reading classes. Ask students about their thoughts on the subject matter of your course and how they intend to put what they have learned in practice. It’s challenging for students to contribute their own responses, and finding a similar response online necessitates having sufficient subject-matter expertise to recognize the appropriate example.

Verify the true identities of test-takers

The safety net to prevent such events is to confirm the genuine identity of test takers, even if it is not very frequent for a different individual to turn up and take a candidate’s exam. A proctoring company like ProctorExam may also carry out ID verification by comparing the test-ID taker’s document to their biometric profile.

Use assessment techniques that make cheating challenging.

The temptation to cheat increases as the stakes rise. Even well-intentioned people can buckle under pressure if a single exam counts for half of their overall mark. Make smaller micro-quizzes throughout the course rather than a single large test. A review quiz with 5 questions isn’t important enough for students to try to cheat on. Also, a self-assured student who has aced review tests won’t take the chance of cheating to get the score they believe they can get.

Provide open-book tests

Allowing students to access the course materials will prevent them from conducting Google searches. Better yet, motivate them. Make more challenging questions that are relevant to your course’s content and are hard to discover online. To obtain the answers they need, your students will still have to conduct research in the book, which will test their critical thinking skills and provide a more engaging learning environment. Also, your students will acquire some useful skills for doing efficient information searches.

Use ProctorExam’s mobile phone monitoring option for greater security

Via the use of the smartphone camera of candidates, ProctorExam provides one more alternative to reduce cheating in online tests. The mobile phone camera is utilized for a 360-degree room scan before the test begins and a diagonal view of the participants’ workplace throughout the exam without encroaching on their personal information. Therefore, texting and checking their phones while being evaluated is practically impossible.

Put technical protections in place

Check it for plagiarism if you think a student has copied work from another source. Make a big question bank and make the quizzes random. Students are forbidden from sharing answers on randomly generated quizzes. Quizzes should be timed so that students who spend too long seeking answers won’t have enough time to complete them. These methods make it difficult for someone to cheat without assistance from several peers when used together. They also won’t inquire if you’ve established a culture of integrity.

How to Avoid Cheating in Online Classes with Academy LMS

There are a number of things that you can do to avoid cheating in online classes, and Academy LMS offers a number of features that can help you do just that.

• Drip content This feature allows you to gradually release course content. This can help prevent students from cheating by giving them less time to access all the course material at once. For example, you could drip out the course content on a weekly or even daily basis.

• Course prerequisites are another feature that can help prevent cheating. This feature allows you to require students to complete certain courses or assessments before they can enroll in a particular course. This can help ensure that students have the necessary knowledge and skills before they attempt to take the course.

Also, the Quiz randomization feature of the Academy LMS can help prevent students from cheating on quizzes and exams. This feature randomizes the order of the questions on quizzes and exams so that students cannot memorize the answers.

Today, safeguard your courses.

If you employ all the above strategies, you won’t make cheating impossible, but you will make it impractical. Improve the success and enjoyment of your course by engaging learners from the start and promoting a culture of integrity. LearnDash is here to help make your classes more secure.

We hope you will have a good understanding of what you should do to avoid cheating in online classes. If you liked this article, please join our Facebook community and follow us on Twitter for our latest article updates.

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