Title: Reviewing and Addressing Suspicious Behavior
Course: Academic Integrity > Section: Encouraging Academic Integrity

Not all suspicious behavior is caused by cheating. Students may react to stressful situations in a variety of ways, and this can be reflected in their body language, how well they perform under pressure, and in their grades. Thus, it's important to look at the total picture to determine if a student has cheated or not. Here are some ways to gather information and make an informed decision.

Strategy 1: Compare their grades over time

Did a student get all Cs and then suddenly, they got an A? Maybe the student studied hard to bring up those Cs, but if the grade is out of character for a student, it's worth investigating.

Strategy 2: Check the analytics

One of the handiest features of Canvas is that they have course analytics that you can use in your efforts to make your course better and discourage dishonest behavior.

Consider setting up both Quiz Auditing and New Course and Student Analytics, and check the Quiz statistics to gather information about student performance, log-in attempts, and page views, as well as the length of time it took for a student to take the quiz or exam.

1. Inside your course, go to Settings and then to the Featured Options tab. Enable New Course and User Analytics and Quiz Log Auditing.
2. New Course and User Analytics will allow you to check the analytics from the home page so that you can get an overview of course activity, both for the class as a whole and per student.
3. To access the quiz auditing tool, you can go to the quiz page, and next to the Edit button at the top, there will be a dropdown menu.
4. On that dropdown menu, choose show student quiz results, then choose the student you'd like to review. Click on their name to see the date and time they submitted, and the amount of time the attempt took. You can view the log by clicking on the link to the right.

This is most useful when a student claims that they tried to take the quiz but it wouldn't submit.

Strategy 3: Compare video footage

Especially in an online class, getting video footage of students prior to taking an exam using LockDown Browser will help determine if behavior is suspicious for that individual by setting up baseline behaviors. You can get this by swapping in a course introduction discussion board with a Flipgrid video board and having a LockDown Browser set up quiz at the beginning to troubleshoot any issues they might have with the technology. By establishing something to compare the footage to, you can also determine if any flags are caused by the quality of their lighting and catch those things early, when there aren't any real stakes involved. Encourage students to choose a spot that they can, if possible, do all of their assignments from. It's not always possible, but if you can find that out in advance, and have students contact you early with potential issues, you can head off trouble later on.

Strategy 4: Ask them about the behavior

It's tempting to accuse a student of cheating, but instead of creating an immediate confrontation, simply ask the student to explain their behavior in a way that doesn't put them immediately on the defensive. This may seem logical, but it's easy to get caught up in our own conviction and miss a valuable opportunity to help a student who is struggling to learn the material or to complete the class for a variety of reasons - whether they cheated or not.

Going back to a point on the previous page, be aware that artificial lighting is more of an issue for students of darker skin tone, which means they can get flagged disproportionately. Remain aware of that bias when determining how and when to approach a student for suspicious behavior.

Using LockDown Browser Efficiently

Now, let's talk about some strategies for viewing videos in LockDown Browser. Reviewing these can be time-consuming and demoralizing without having an effective strategy in place. A few basic tips: set aside some time, grab your favorite (non-alcoholic!) beverage and maybe a snack to make the viewing a little more pleasant.

Dr. Mary Schilling, Professor in Biological Sciences, provided these tips for working with LockDown Browser and Monitor:

- Establish the norms in the syllabus. Make sure you have your quiz notification material clearly stating that irregularities are a problem and may receive a reduced score or a zero. This way, you are not accusing them of cheating if you don't want to get into that accusation.
- Good test-taking and video etiquette. Remind them to sit at a desk if possible, be well-lit, and keep their eyes on the screen. Don't take the test in bed, or have any electronics within reach. (There is a pdf file that you can use that has dos and don'ts included in the next module of this course.)
- Practice. Offer students the opportunity to test out the software in a low-stakes or no-stakes practice quiz. Warn students in early quizzes about their behavior so that they know the video is observed and how they can test properly.
- Sort your results. After the test has been taken, sort your video results in LockDown Browser by the time taken to finish. This is the most effective method of looking for cheating. Good cheaters will not necessarily be picked up by the flagged notification.
- Check the environment video. If this is done well, it's a great indicator, because they've proven they didn't start with anything. Kids who cheat always have a sketchy video because they are using something.
- Prioritize students who have long times and high scores and all flagged video.
- Watch their pre-exams. Students do not realize they are being monitored here. This is often when they set up books, blur the camera, set up a friend, etc.
- Click the milestones box. It tells you when they answered the questions. Then look for the long pauses between questions because this is where they are stuck and will reach for their cheat.
- Watch their eyes. Look for eyes that are reading to the side and then go back to the screen to read the questions. Look for consistency in the exam, not just an occasional observation of this behavior.
- Use headphones. This way, you can pick up the sound of clicking of another keypad or conversations with other students.
- Note the times that you see these things and record them in the notes box so that if they ask to review the video, you can go straight to what you found.
- Screen shot the cheating and then send an email with the "irregularity" noted, the comment that you reduce the score or this is a warning and offer to review the video with them. Students who cheat rarely ask to review the video. (Although this has happened that during the review, the student confessed.)
- Decide how you will handle repeat cheating.

While it's important to lay out the behavior expected prior to the exam, remember that taking a test - especially those high-stakes ones - while under surveillance, which may be in less-than-ideal situations, can be stressful and stress responses make it more difficult to remember everything needed. All of the directions added for taking the exam using LockDown Browser and Monitor need to be remembered in addition to the information for the exam itself.