How can I be sure students won cheat on unsupervised online tests?
You can’t be 100% certain. However, you can build in certain measures that will offer some security. • You can have a large database of questions from which Perception draws at random – for example, each student gets 25 questions pulled randomly from a database of 40 or 50. • Also, each student can get the questions in a different order; and in multiple-choice questions, the choices can be scrambled. You can make these choices when creating the test. • Most important, when a student logs into our Perception server, many functions are disabled, such as right-clicking (preventing copying the page) and printing. Tell your students to use IE only, as some functions cannot be disabled in some versions of Netscape, and the AOL browser does not work well with Perception. None of this is foolproof, and you always have the option of requiring students to take the test in a proctored environment.
