To ensure that your assessments provide a genuine measure of a student's achievement of the learning outcomes, there is a need for the work to have been performed by the student who is being assessed. There are a range of reasons for students to plagiarise or cheat when it comes to assessment, and with the rise in stakes, and in access to people who are willing to complete assessments for money, the decision to do so is becoming more common than ever. We need to be smart about how we design assessment so that instances of plagiarism and cheating are minimised.
The most effective approach to reducing or eliminating cheating and plagiarism in your unit is through a combination of teaching about academic integrity, and designing assessment that minimises opportunities. This page provides an overview of some strategies for both teaching and assessment design strategies. Most of these strategies are appropriate regardless of the mode of delivery of a unit, although some may be easier to implement in units with an on-campus delivery.
Inform and explain - In addition to including the mandated Academic integrity section in your unit outline, and possibly asking students to sign a plagiarism statement upon submission of assignments, talk to students about academic integrity and why it matters - you could make reference to the policies during teaching sessions and modules, and provide opportunities for students to ask questions, to seek clarification of meaning, and to share their understanding of what these policies and expectations mean.
Clarify - What does and does not constitute plagiarism or collusion can be points of anxiety for many students, so including discussion and clarification of these concepts as part of the unit supports student welfare as well as their learning and achievement. The Academic Integrity Module has been developed to help students understand what plagiarism is, and to inform students of the study supports available. There is a link to this Module and to the Academic Integrity site for students on the Student Portal in the Unit Information section of your unit's MyLO Homepage - consider directing your students to this valuable tool, or integrating its use into one or more of your weekly learning activities. Stress to your students that they should confirm with teaching staff whether advertised tutoring services (including those claiming affiliations with UTAS or using UTAS logos) are actually legitimate UTAS services. If a ‘help’ site doesn’t have ‘utas.edu.au’ in its URL, it’s not a real UTAS site. Ask students not to respond to unsolicited offers of ‘study help’ that come via email or social media and to report possible cheating services.
Support students’ confidence and skill development - Include learning activities that enable students to develop their writing and referencing skills and provide feedback on their attempts. Work with your tutors (if you have them in your unit) to identify as early as possible students who may be struggling to cope or to understand the referencing expectations and direct them to the student support services. Include a direct link from your unit's
MyLO Site to the Library page related to the Referencing Style preferred/required to be used in your unit.
Students who are stressed and feel unsupported academically are at risk of resorting to cheating. Make students aware that they can talk to you about challenges they’re experiencing with their studies and the support options available. Highlight the University’s extension and special consideration provisions.
This list, adapted from Carroll (2002), outlines some broad concepts that will assist you to deter plagiarism and cheating on assessments in your unit.
Change the content or type of assessment task often (e.g., from year to year).
Use tasks that require students to reflect, journalise, analyse, or evaluate.
Use tasks that require students to integrate / reflect / apply issues to their own context and experience, or utilise current/recent events and 'hot' topics.
Ask students to submit evidence of their information gathering and planning, or have staged assessment where students submit partially completed work prior to final submission.
Ask students to provide working drafts, or incorporate a re-drafting process into the task itself.
Use tasks that are interdependent and build upon each other.
Tie in the classroom experience – for example:
including class discussions in assignments
using presentations in class
ask students to informally (or formally) report on their assessment work in class
Online Assessment
Cluskey Jr, Ehlen and Raiborn (2011) provide a set of recommendations for conducting tests in the online environment in order to minimise opportunities for cheating. These include:
Offer the exam at one set time only (also applicable for students in other time zones)
Provide a very short open period (e.g., 15 minutes) for students to begin the exam
Randomise the question order, and also randomise the answer order for applicable questions
Present questions one at a time, and do not allow students to move between questions
Set a time limit for completion of the exam (that is suited to the level of performance required)
Allow only a single attempt to be made by each student (stipulate expectations for students to take responsibility for having suitable Internet connectivity etc.)
Use the Respondus Lockdown Browser
Do not use the same set of questions each semester offering (change at least 1/3 of questions)
The use of MCQs for assessment is relatively widespread across Higher Education units, particularly facilitated by the online environment. The use of MCQs can range from providing formative assessment through review quizzes based on content knowledge through to sophisticated media-rich, higher order questions.
The use of MCQs for formative assessment is well established and can be effective to give students an indication of their progress. The inclusion of results from MCQs used for this purpose can be to ensure that students complete the task – or can be linked to specific learning outcomes. Providing these purposes are specifically outlined to the students, these uses are quite legitimate, however unless they comprehensively address the learning outcomes of the unit and steps are taken to enhance integrity of the task, then it would be reasonable to allocate a relatively small percentage of the final mark of the unit to such tasks.
Using MCQs as a more substantial component of assessment requires much greater consideration than the scenario mentioned above. The advantages of MCQs for ease of marking, speed of feedback and capacity for analysis (for example in disciplines such as medicine) need to be balanced with the complexity of construction of such questions where they are to be used for summative assessment.
There are a number of steps that can to be taken to maximise assessment integrity:
There is a considerable art to writing MCQs that can assess learning outcomes in a way that is not trivial, and picks up through well written distractors, misconceptions or areas that have not been understood.
Questions should relate directly to the learning outcomes of the unit.
A large bank of questions that are able to be rotated is desirable when using MCQs for summative purposes.
Rotation of the answer for each question should be employed (i.e., the correct answer is randomised from the same stem question).
Questions should be of sufficient complexity to prevent easy recall.
For online MCQ tests, the window of time for completing the test should be restricted so as to ensure that students are completing the assessment task simultaneously if possible. (Noting that there is flexibility, as in examinations, for students to gain permission to access the test at other times and they can be asked to sign a Statutory Declaration that they have not spoken to any other student.
Questions should not be drawn from commercial data banks (e.g., through text book suppliers) or other data bases where students can access answers through internet searches.
Clear guidelines for students regarding passing on any information regarding the assessment should be given.
The use of technology applications such as Respondus lockdown should be used where possible (this limits the students only to accessing the quiz, and prevents them from opening any other application in their browser).
Correct answers should not be supplied to students prior to all students completing the assessment task.
Finally, reading from the policy provisions, in all cases the use of MCQs should be supplemented with other forms of assessment (online or otherwise). Moderation of results, according to our 3 point focus should also be undertaken. In this way, most issues with assessment tasks are likely to be picked up during the peer review in the design phase – or at the point of assessment, allowing any adjustments to be made in a timely manner.
Staff are strongly encouraged to consult with Educational Developers in their College or Professional Learning and Networks for Teachers when initially designing online quizzes.
References
Carroll, J. (2002). A Handbook for Deterring Plagiarism in Higher Education. Oxford: Oxford Centre for Staff and Learning Development.
Cluskey Jr., G.R., Ehlen, C., & Raiborn, M. (2011). Thwarting online exam cheating without proctor supervision. Journal of Academic and Business Ethics, 4. Retrieved from http://www.aabri.com/manuscripts/11775.pdf