Ways to Prevent Exam Cheating
To avoid exam cheating instances, you need to incorporate technology. Online tests are slowly replacing the traditional way in which teachers set exams. This goes in line with the other aspects of our lives where many of operations have changes to paperless including at banks, offices and billing departments.
Online tests … can they be foolproof? Yes and they can be more convenient because students can take them from any location if they have a computer and internet connection. The most important issues for school administrators is to gauge whether transformation from paper and pen to online tests is having an impact on their students and test taking process. It is also important to check whether there are shortcomings associated with new technology to address them accordingly .
Technology is not just used for school exam procedures. These days, employers have taken it up to provide pre-employment tests, which have become popular overnight. You can use when issuing tests for job seekers at any part of the world. The elimination of distance between test takers and administrators has helped to cut the convenience and trouble of traveling for taking a simple test.
Here is how you can make your test or exam more interesting:
1. Make use of multimedia
Be more versatile. Technology enables administrators to create random exams that are more engaging to test takers than the traditional paper exams. For example, an online test generator gives you the option to add PDFs, audio clips, images, videos and other test items that help to enrich content. At the same time, multimedia helps to make online tests more inclusive for all sorts of test takers, including those who are more visual .
2. Make it harder to cheat
Technology is a good way to prevent dishonesty during exams. Cheating is a major concern to examiners even when they issue a mock test because it puts the honest people at a disadvantage. The quality of a test is greatly reduced if some people cheat and many will never recognize its validity. When there cheating, it costs more time for teachers or company administrators to set and issue another test. To prevent cheating, designers of online test programs included a number of built-in features that deter cheating.
These security features help to curb cheating
♦ Browser lock-down is one of these features. It disables keys such as arrow keys, ESC and print screen. Therefore, test taker will not be able to take any screenshot of a test or go back to previous screen to change their answers .
♦ "Accept first answer only" feature that prevents test takers from changing the first answer they provide.
♦ Dual protocol login. This feature requires an administrator to be logged in before test takers can begin their test. It was designed to prevent students from accessing questions before time assigned for the test and get more time to prepare, which will be unfair to others.
Technology has made it easy to create different types of questions such as filling-in-blanks, short answers and others. It also makes it possible to format test is an excellent way and include instructions.