How to Stop Students From Cheating on Remote Tests During a Pandemic
A physics professor at Southeastern Louisiana University shows you how to prevent cheating
Nearly every school has moved classes online for the remainder of the semester to allow for social distancing. What exactly does this mean for final exams? Yes, most classes will still have a final exam, but it will have to be administered on some type of remote platform.
Maybe you will have a timed online multiple-choice exam. Perhaps you will have the students complete a project instead of an exam. Or faculty just might say “whatevs” and send a PDF version of the final for the students to complete on their own time (this is what I’m going to do).
And the biggest question of all: If teachers aren’t sitting in a lecture hall staring down the students, how do we prevent them from cheating?
Option 1: Don’t worry about cheating
Everyone who signed up to teach or take a remote class, raise your hand. That’s right — teachers didn’t plan for this course to be online, and neither did their students. This is not a normal semester.
Both students and faculty could have just thrown our hands up in the air and said “forget this” and called…
