by David M. Eplion, PhD, and Thomas J. Keefe, PhD

For as long as there have been exams, there has been cheating on exams. Online exams are no different, although they do provide some challenges that set them apart from traditional face-to-face exams. These include a heightened opportunity to collaborate with others, greater possibility of using unapproved resources, and an increased likelihood that someone other than the student is taking the test.

These problems are not insignificant and do not have easy answers. In spite of these very real challenges, we still wanted to offer online exams to our students because they present a number of important benefits. These include quicker and more accurate grading, more time to spend in class covering important topics, and faster feedback for the students. We decided that we needed to take steps to identify and prevent cheating on our exams and we will share some of our experiences in this paper.

Who we are, what we do
We teach undergraduate business courses at a regional campus of Indiana University. All our classes meet face-to-face for three hours a week, but we administer our exams online outside of normal class time. Our exams are both multiple choice and true/false in nature, and the students take three of them throughout the semester.

On our syllabus, we describe the nature of our online exams and also list a testing protocol. During our first class meeting, we go over the protocol in detail. We also include a section of the protocol on every exam. In part, it reads, “This is not an open-book or open-notes exam. This exam is to be taken during the allotted time period without the aid of books, notes, or other students. You have approximately 45 seconds per question to complete this exam. This exam must be taken online from start to finish. Do not download the test to take it or distribute it to anyone. The statistics feature…will monitor and report how you take this exam.”

These guidelines ensure that our students know exactly what is expected of them. In essence, they define for all involved what is and is not considered cheating on our exams.

The importance of courseware
Our first suggestion for helping would-be online exam administrators detect cheating is to use professional courseware. We use a proprietary system called Oncourse, but other commercially available products such as Blackboard and WebCT are very similar.

Courseware packages are valuable in many ways. To begin, they can be used to password-protect the exam. This helps reduce the possibility that unauthorized people will access the exam. Courseware also tracks the exact time the exam was started and finished. It also can log IP addresses that can be used to trace the location from which the exam was completed.

Taken together, this information can help an instructor find cases where students may have collaborated on the exam. If two or more students take the exam at or about the same time from computer terminals in proximity (as indicated by the IP addresses), there is a possibility that cheating has occurred, and we pursue these cases further.

Sometimes there is a perfectly innocent explanation for this. Other times, it becomes evident that cheating has occurred. However, because “cheating” is such a charged word and can be difficult to prove, we avoid accusing students of it. Instead, we try to document the fact that our exam protocol has been violated.

One of our protocol stipulations is that students not take the exam in the same room at the same time. If we can document that this occurred, we do not accuse the students of cheating. Instead, we simply tell them that the protocol has been violated and that we will not accept the results of their exam.

Courseware also helps make sure timing protocols are not violated. We make our exams available to students only during very narrow time windows. This helps lessen their opportunity to recruit others to help them take the exam. Courseware blocks access to the exam before it is scheduled to begin and restricts access to it after the deadline.

Courseware also keeps track of the total amount of time students spend taking the exam. We have found that giving students an unlimited amount of time to complete the exam creates more potential for collaborating with others or for bringing in material that is not approved. Courseware puts a strict timer on the exam.

If a student has not finished the exam within the allotted time, courseware simply submits to us the student’s progress to that point. For our exams, we have found that allowing students 45 seconds per question gives them enough time to think about and answer each question while not providing so much time that they are tempted to violate our testing protocol.

Test design matters
While courseware is a valuable tool in the fight against cheating, a poorly designed test can limit its effectiveness. Over the years, we have found that there are ways to structure a test that help cut back on cheating.

One strategy is to scramble all the test questions for each student. Courseware also does this for us. In addition, we are able to create a large database of potential questions and then let Oncourse randomly select a subset of questions for each student. It makes it very difficult for students to collaborate when each student’s test is markedly different from everyone else’s in the class.

We also prefer to ask application-based questions as opposed to asking students to just recite facts from the text. Application questions require that students not only know the basic material, but that they also know it well enough to apply it to practical situations. This helps reduce the benefits of using unapproved materials on our exams.

Course design can help as well
The final tool we use to minimize the impact of cheating is our course design. In addition to the three exams we have students take online, we also have them complete nearly 20 graded pretests. Requiring that more than 20 assignments be completed online makes it more difficult for students to recruit others to help them. It either gets very time-consuming or very expensive for them.

We also require a cumulative final exam that is heavily weighted and is administered face-to-face. Because the cumulative final is worth so many points, students must know the material if they hope to successfully complete our course. If they have had someone else take the exams for them over the course of the semester, they will pay for it when taking the final.

Fortunately, we have run statistical analyses that suggest a very strong correlation between performance on the online exams and performance on the face-to-face cumulative final. This suggests that we have had success with our efforts to detect and limit cheating in our classes. We plan to continue to employ these methods in the future.

Still, since no strategies will totally eliminate cheating on exams, we are always looking for new and improved ways to be even more effective. And we welcome any suggestions or comments that the readers of this article might have for us.

David M. Eplion is an assistant professor of business management at Indiana University Southeast. Contact him at deplion@ius.edu. Thomas J. Keefe is an associate professor of business administration at Indiana University Southeast.

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