How to prevent cheating in online classes? Use these 4 teaching hacks.
Online learning has become the ‘new lifestyle’ for education.
Classrooms have turned virtual, converting education into a technologically developed sector.
Though this development has several positives, one of the common issues faced by it is rampant cheating.
Video classes support a certain level of interaction, however, the absence of an in-person interaction has led to ‘easy cheating’ in online classes and exams.
If you are a first-time teacher, then you should know the different ways in which cheating happens and understand how to prevent cheating in online classes.
All of this is covered in this blog post. Read on.
Students are more advanced than the teachers in using technology to their advantage.
The following are some of the ways in which students cheat in online exams.
Students resort to shortcuts when they don’t feel connected to the course.
Like e.g giving namesake assignments without understanding their needs ends up with students googling the shortcuts and passing the exam with minimal efforts.
In a recent survey titled: Cheating in the Digital Age, 32.1% admitted to cheating in a classroom, and 32.7% of students admitted to cheating in an online class.
As per the report, cheating online is slightly higher with students asking help from friends to answer quizzes.
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Like I mentioned above, student’s cheat when they can’t connect with the course.
Another reason could be that they are unclear about the assignment. There is also undue pressure for the student to ace the test without much preparation.
However, In most cases, the more disconnect a student has with the instructor the higher are the chances of resorting to malpractices.
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Most people have a misconception that it is impossible to eradicate cheating in online classes and exams.
But Rohini, one of our earliest clients, who faced a lot of cheating incidents in her academy, completely suppressed them.
She embraced the following tricks and techniques to achieve this feat.
By incorporating these techniques, the cheating in her class completely got eliminated and her purpose of teaching got achieved.
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Apart from these techniques, you can also try the below techniques to reduce cheating
The below technologies can also help to detect cheating in online exams –
Just like an invigilator in a physical classroom test, an online proctoring system can monitor the students in an exam.
An AI-powered biometric scanner can be used to ensure the authenticity of the students’ identity, which eliminates impersonation.
Facial recognition and fingerprint scanning are the most common checks done to authenticate the identity.
Students tend to search for answers on the internet and everyone ends up writing the same answer for a particular question.
In such cases, plagiarism detectors come in handy.
Teachers can run the plagiarism software on the answer scripts and easily find out whether the answer was copied or not.
Here are a few suggested plagiarism detectors for teachers:
Turnitin – Best for Teachers & Educators
Prepostseo – Best for Teachers & Students
Other technology like keystroke recognition and IP address tracker, can also be used to detect cheating.
Keystroke recognition can detect keystrokes and typing patterns, to ensure that students do not copy and paste answers from a website.
IP address tracking can be used to detect proxy writers writing from another location.
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Be it online or offline, students can always resort to cheating. So, then how to prevent cheating in online classes?
By giving your students the best way to interact and be understood. Create your course materials that make it rewarding for them to submit assignments.
Don’t load them with assignments. Remember that, it’s the student’s job to do the assignments. But it’s the instructor’s job to create a learning context for your students.
More than 300+ instructors use question randomization and limiting the number of test-attempts to prevent cheating in online classes.
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