Speaker 1: Hello everyone, I'm Andy Truce, and today we're going to cover a topic that we all love talking about, cheating. So we're going to first start this webinar by talking about strategies to help convince students to not want to even cheat in the first place. After that, we'll transition into settings and tools that are available in WebAssign to make it more difficult for students to cheat in your assessments. And then finally, we'll cover reports that are available in WebAssign to help you check for instances of academic dishonesty. The research has shown that there's a lot of reasons that students cheat, from a perception of teacher apathy, an ambiguous understanding of what cheating is, seeing their peers cheating, lack of intrinsic motivation, and a lack of perceived ability that they can learn the material and they can pass the exam without needing to cheat. So available in WebAssign that can help with this problem is MyClass Insights. MyClass Insights is a report for students that shows them at a topic-by-topic level where they're doing well and where they may need additional practice. So if they're doing well, they can see that and gain the confidence that they don't need to cheat on the exam, and conversely, if they're doing less well, it gives them the opportunity to get additional practice so they won't need to cheat on the exam. As an instructor, you can help with this by giving more frequent assessments, which will give more data and more practiceability to students. We highly would recommend mentioning that this is available to students in their courses. Similarly, if you'd like to assign a practice exam, you can do this and require that students are doing it before getting into the exam with conditional release. So if you go into the conditional release feature, which is accessible from the WebAssign scheduler by hitting the blue arrow and then going into edit restrictions, you can require that students achieve a certain percentage on the practice exam. In this example, you're seeing 75% before accessing the real exam. So this is a great way to incentivize students to do the practice who might not otherwise be doing it. And then here's a really simple recommendation. Make sure that you reference the honor code in your assessments. Research has shown that reminding students of their morality in this type of situation definitely has an effect on whether students are going to be open to cheating. So this was represented in one study by Dan Ariely, a behavioral economist at a Duke University who some of you may know, who did a study where the day before a final exam, a fictitious student sent an email out to the entire class. And the fictitious student said, hey, I found a website that's got all of the answers to last year's final exam. Click here to see it. Now, 50% of the students who received this email also received a mention in the email that said you might want to refer to the university honor code prior to doing this. The other 50% of the emails did not see that. And you can see from the data, there was a large difference in the percentage of students who opened the email and clicked the link when the honor code was mentioned versus wasn't mentioned. So you can replicate this in WebAssign. You can create your own honor code question from scratch. If you'd like to see an example, there's a question ID shown here in the slide. If you take this and you go into WebAssign and hit search, look, put in that ID, and then hit duplicate, you can then make a version of that question for yourself. So now let's transition into different settings and tools that are available in WebAssign that actually make it more difficult to cheat. So if you go into an assignment and you click on its settings, there'll be a lot of different options for you. This first one you're seeing here is the assignment display. Now, by default, for most assignments, students will see all of the questions on one page and all the questions will be in the same order. If you'd like to change that, though, to make it a little bit more difficult for students to compare that one student's question seven may be different than another student's question nine, what you can do is you can randomize the question order, and you can also display just one question at a time so they can't see all the questions on one page. Now, of course, if you want the assignment or assessment to grow in difficulty, you may not want to randomize the order of the questions, but for cheating purposes, this is, of course, an option for you. Also available in WebAssign, to randomize not just the order, the questions themselves, you can use the question pooling feature. So let's say that you have an assessment and you want to give two problems on definite integrals. What you can do here is you could build a pool. So for instance, you could select four questions on definite integrals and pool it so that students will only receive two of those four, and which two those students receive will be different on a student-by-student basis. Now, of course, the vast majority of problems in WebAssign themselves are randomized. If they're not randomized, there's going to be a pedagogical reason for this and that the question didn't lend itself well to being randomized, and we'll denote this in the question itself. It'll clearly state that it's not randomized, but the vast majority are randomized, and by default, this is set in WebAssign for you. Now, you also have control in the assignment settings over what feedback students see after they complete different assessments. So you can set it so that students see whether they got questions correct or incorrect after they complete the assessment. But of course, if you have an assessment that's due on a Wednesday, and students complete the assessment, let's say, an hour before it's due, you may want to turn this off to not show that feedback before the due date. Because in that case, the student who has finished the assessment early could use the feedback of what they got correct or incorrect and share that with another student to help them. Now, let's say you have a couple of sections, and in one section, your assessment's due on a Wednesday, and in another one, it's on a Thursday. In that case, for the Wednesday section, you may also want to uncheck this box to show feedback after the due date. Because otherwise, students in the Wednesday section who are friends with those in the Thursday section could share similar feedback. So what you could do is you could uncheck this box, and then after the Thursday section is finished, then you can check it so students can see all the feedback on how they did the assessment for learning purposes. And here's an obvious one. In WebAssign, you do have full control over how many attempts students have at a question by question level. You can also do this at not just an assignment level, but at a question level. Now, let's say you have a multiple choice question that has five options, and you're allowing by default five attempts for the assignment. You may not want to allow five attempts for that individual question. Surely, there are probably students in your class who will still find a way to get that question wrong, but nevertheless, you may want to limit the number of submissions allowed, especially for a true and false question. You may want to knock this down into one. So when you look at the questions in the assignment, you'll want to click on expand all, make sure you're looking at all of the questions, and then highlighted in red is the ability of how you change the number of submissions at a question by question level. Now, most of those are tools to help make it more difficult for students to work together. How about making it harder for an individual student to look up answers? Well, of course, one thing you can do is you could set a timer on the assessment. You can do this by, again, accessing the edit restrictions that's available within the assignment scheduler, and you can set it so there's a timer that's available. If you have a student who has time accommodations and isn't allowed to have double time or triple time or something like that, you can grant extra time for specific students as well. Now, if you go into the class settings, you'll actually find some other advanced options to make this a little bit more difficult for students. So on the left, you're seeing the ability to highlight randomized text. Now, by default, if we have randomized the number, that will be shown in red to both you as an instructor as well as your students. But if you'd like to hide that from students so that they can't easily see what is the randomized number, which will make it a little bit more difficult to figure out what value might change from question to question, you can turn that red off. And then additionally, if you'd like to also hide the question name from the students, you can do that as well. This will prevent students from taking the question name that they see in the top right in the assignment and putting it into Google. Now, that may not help them anyway, but nevertheless, for cheating prevention purposes, it might be best to hide that question name from students. Now, if you really want to, of course, know if students know the material, seeing their work is, of course, going to help with that, and you can do that in WebAssign. So in WebAssign, if you'd like to enable Show My Work, this will give students the option to use a math palette to type in their work. They can also upload an image. Potentially, they could snap a photo of a piece of paper on their phone and upload that into WebAssign. You can do that as well. Now, if you'd like to do this in an assignment level and require it, you can do that. You can make it optional for additional credit. However, what we'd probably recommend as most efficient is to set this at a question-by-question level. So rather than necessarily looking at students' work for every single question, if you're only concerned about cheating prevention, you can put this in for just a handful of problems. You can do this by, within the assignment editor, for each individual question, where you're seeing that red rectangle, click on the button next to the one, and that'll allow you to require or make optional Show My Work at a question-by-question level. And finally, how about providing a secure environment? If you'd like to use LockDown Browser, you can do this in WebAssign by accessing the same Edit Restrictions button that we talked about before. LockDown Browser will make it difficult for students to do virtually anything on their computer, though it will caution, though, of course, if they have their laptop open, this will not prevent them from pulling out their phone and snapping a photo. So for those reasons, you may want to also use online proctoring, there's services available for that. You can also, of course, have students use a free video conferencing software, record themselves in their face, have them share their screen and send you a link to the recording. Now if you'd like to control when students access the exam, you can, of course, use the Available Date function when scheduling an assignment, but you can also put in a password. So you can enable a password and then send that out to your students. If you're concerned about students getting this password and then forwarding it off to their friends to go into the assignment and then take the exam for them, one thing that you can do is you can also change the password mid-exam. So if you change the password 10 minutes into the exam, any student who got the password and then sends it off to their friends won't be able to access the exam at that point. So that's one other idea to consider. Now, having said all that, if you have a specific student and you're concerned that they may have cheated and you're looking for proof, we do have some reports in WebAssign to help you with that. So if you go into the score view in WebAssign, you'll have available to you all of the time on task data. So this will show you at an individual student level for every single assignment, how much time did they spend on it. So if you're seeing a student spent only five minutes on a 50-minute exam, that tells you probably one of two things. One, it is possible that of course they went into the exam, they printed it out, left, did all their work on paper, and then typed all of the answers into WebAssign. Of course, it's also possible that they cheated on the exam and that's how they did it so quickly. To give you some additional data here, we do also track in our logs, which are available in the score view, a lot of data about how students performed on the assessment. So this will show you not only when did they submit every individual part, it'll show you where the assessment was downloaded from. So you can see here this IP address, and if you go into Google, you can just copy and paste that IP address and it'll show you this one in particular came from El Paso, Texas. Now if a student came into an exam and then another student came into that same exam and two students were working together, this will show a downloaded from and it'll give you two different IP addresses. And then from there, you can look those IP addresses up and surely if you see that one of them came from El Paso, Texas, and another came from Boston, Massachusetts, well, that probably tells you something about it. So we hope these strategies do help you promote academic honesty in your courses. Best of luck the rest of the semester.