Title: Building Tests
Course: Academic Integrity > Section: Encouraging Academic Integrity

One of the biggest issues that instructors face is the dissemination of quizzes and exam questions among students and online. It would be great if every test could be built from scratch, but not only is that time-consuming and unrealistic, it's also not the best use of your time. So while there will be some of that discussed below, the goal of this is to set up some tests that have enough flexibility and variety in them that they encourage students to be honest while not making it too onerous for you to create and grade.

Before we get into the actual building blocks of the exam, take a moment to think about your students. What are their goals? What are their strengths and weaknesses? What purpose does this test serve and how can it help them learn? Does the test need to be closed-book or can they use other resources? Can this exam be broken up into smaller quizzes or sections?

Once you have the goals and purpose set and have laid out your expectations for the students, it's time to set up the exam. Canvas offers both the Quizzes and the New Quizzes tool. For purposes of this module, we'll be using the Quizzes classic tool built in unless otherwise specified. New Quizzes does offer additional perks, like shuffling the exam questions as well as the answers. For more information, contact CITE's Instructional Designers to set up a meeting or enroll in one of our trainings.

Strategy 1: Use Canvas's built-in tools

- Quiz banks with randomization built in
- Shuffle answers
- Only show one question at a time
- Don't show the answers until a certain point (or go over it in class, instead)
- Add a time limit

Strategy 2: Use a variety of question types and formats

Go beyond the multiple choice and try matching, multiple dropdowns, short-answer, and essay questions. This makes it harder for students to screen capture and disseminate the tests to their peers. It also requires them to recall the information in a different way and prevents students from using the process of elimination on questions they aren't sure about. Recalling the information in different ways allows them to not only recall the information but demonstrate understanding and application of what they've learned.

Strategy 3: Lower the stakes (or at least spread out the risk)

We've already said this more than once, but it bears repeating here: students are more likely to cheat when the exam can make or break their grades. Provide more, lower-stakes exams and quizzes rather than one or two big ones. Questions where they can get partial credit rather than all or nothing can also alleviate some of the pressure.

Some other ideas for spreading out the risk:

- Consider using Kaltura video quizzes as a way to add in some lower-stakes quizzing while watching the lecture. This can help engage them in the lecture materials as well, rather than just passively watching.
- Try building in two attempts to a quiz, so if they mess up, they have a second attempt. This seems counterintuitive to not having access to the questions, but it can alleviate anxiety for a lot of nervous test takers.
- Drop the lowest quiz grade. Going along with the idea of more shorter, more frequent exams, knowing that the worst grades will be dropped removes a major incentive to cheat.

Strategy 4: A Rose by any other name...

A test is a test is a test, right? Maybe not. Renaming your quizzes and exams "knowledge checks" may not make much of a difference to the format, but it does reframe the purpose of the assessment. A knowledge check allows students to verify, both to themselves and to you, that they know and understand the material they've been studying. It also carries less weight to it than a "Final exam.," which carries heavy associations.

Can you think of some other ways to reframe the concept of assessments to better reflect student learning while removing some of the bad associations?

Strategy 5: Have your students make the test (and the study guide)

Throughout the unit, have students submit questions and answers they think should be on the test and include some of them. It will provide you with some fresh questions that you can pull from, and the students then have some vested interest. As a bonus, you know what is capturing their interest and attention, or where they may need to do some additional work. Keep in mind that students aren't instructors so their questions are likely not going to be usable without modification. However, you can clean up the questions and make them more appropriate to their level of ability.

Strategy 6: Provide clear explanations

Why is your exam closed-book? What is it that this exam will measure and how will that information help them learn better? How does it help you assess their learning and mastery of the material? By stating the reasons why your tests are set up a specific way prior to the test, and providing some idea of what to expect, students can go into the test with some idea of how it will help them be better students and eventually, better citizens. Health care workers who can make snap decisions based on the knowledge they have in their head to save a life, for example, can benefit from rigorous, closed-book exams, so make that explicit in the set up.

For example, a simple statement like:

This exam will contain 50 questions. 40 of those will be a combination of true or false, multiple choice, and matching, designed to assess your retention of the key terms and phrases we've been learning over the course of the past few weeks. Five questions will be short answer questions where you will demonstrate that you not only remember what you've learned, but that you understand them and their functions. The remaining five questions will be short essays and case studies where you will show how you can apply what you have learned to situations you might encounter in the future.

I have chosen to make this exam closed-book because in many future situations in this field, you will need to make informed decisions on the spot. Practicing this ability now will lay the groundwork for you to be able to do so in the future. This test should take you 90 approximately minutes. I have set the time limit to 120 minutes. You will have a 24-hour window in which to start the test; once you start it, you must complete it in one sitting.

So why is this important? It helps to prevent the establishment of an antagonistic relationship between student and teacher and instead build a supportive environment in which you establish mutual trust. By making your motives transparent, you invite your students to trust that you have their education as your first priority, and that you are not merely there to judge them.

Strategy 7: Use Quiz Banks and Question Groups

One of the easiest ways to help deter cheating is to build a test bank of questions and then set the quiz up to pull a certain number of questions randomly. Each student will get tested on the same materials, but each will get a different test. Let's walk through the steps to set that up.

First, build your quiz bank. These directions from Canvas walk you through, step-by-step. You can also import a test bank from your textbook publisher, or from a document using Respondus 4.0 (contact CITE for assistance).

Once you've created the question bank, you can then set up your quiz using question groups.

If there are some questions that you want every student to answer, you can do a combination. Add a single question or find the question and add it, and then add a random group of questions. In this way, every exam will be unique, making it harder for students to share the information with their peers.

Strategy 8: Use LockDown Browser

LockDown Browser is a browser tool that does what it says, locking the students so they can't navigate away to another page to look up the answers. There are two parts to this; the browser and Monitor. Monitor allows you to require the students to take their exams using their webcam and audio tools.

However, there are some important considerations when using LockDown Browser that you should take into account. Like Turnitin, LockDown Browser is the last line of defense and cannot address every situation. Students have found ways to override and cheat while using LockDown Browser and Monitor, and the flags are computer-driven and don't always catch suspicious behavior.

Moreover, LockDown Browser, like many surveillance tools, has issues when it comes to equity and diversity. For example, LockDown Browser does not work on Chromebooks, so you will have to create a separate exam for those students or come up with an alternate proctoring method. This provides an unequal testing experience and potentially an additional burden on students coming from low-income backgrounds.

Some other potential issues:

- Not all students have webcams
- Some students may be using computers borrowed from work or someone else and unable to install the browser
- Not all students have a well-lit space that can record well
- Some skin colors do not show up well on film, particularly in artificial light, and can generate false positives for suspicious behavior
- Some students have an anxiety response to being monitored
- Testing applications can flag students for talking, but some students with learning disabilities may need to do so to process the information
- Some students look off into space or off to the side when thinking and LockDown Browser may flag this as suspicious

It's also important to note that just because behavior is flagged, it does not mean that the student is cheating. It's up to you as the instructor to review the videos and make the determination based on all of the information available, including the video, their grades and patterns. We've talked about the importance of knowing your students in previous pages. Similar to knowing your students' writing styles when doing a paper, it's beneficial to know a student's tics and behaviors from video prior to an exam. Consider adding in opportunities to be on video throughout the course that do not involve exams to help students get comfortable with being on camera and to establish a baseline of body language.

Next, we're going to look at some strategies for reviewing and addressing suspicious behavior when it does occur.