Introduction

Over the past several semesters, faculty and students have undertaken the challenging task of rapidly adjusting to remote teaching and learning. With the increased use of remote exams, faculty are understandably concerned about ensuring academic integrity and preventing cheating.  As with face-to-face exams, it is not possible to completely “cheat-proof” an online exam, however, there are several pedagogical and technological strategies you can use to disincentivize and reduce the possibility of cheating. Visit the Assessment Strategies article to review the Office of the Provost’s announcement regarding remote assessments as well as information about remote assessment design best practices and considerations.

Below, you will find a list of strategies for improving the security of your online exams, as well as information about what Canvas quiz logs and analytics can and cannot tell you about students’ behavior and performances on online exams.

If you have additional questions about online exam design, contact Teaching Support at teaching@pitt.edu to schedule an exam review or consultation. If you have additional questions about Canvas, review the Teaching Center’s Canvas resource hub, the Canvas@Pitt resources, or contact Education Technology Consulting at edtech@teaching.pitt.edu.

Best Practices for Improving the Security of Online Exams

While Canvas is not a test proctoring tool, there are steps you can take to improve the security of your test, as well as encourage academic integrity among your students.

• Have students affirm an academic integrity pledge (for examples, see this list from the University of Delaware) or the relevant language from Pitt’s Academic Policies as the first item on your quiz.
• Wherever possible, consider alternate methods of assessment such as open book exams, short answer or essay questions, peer review, and annotated bibliographies. For more information about alternative assessment strategies, please see the Teaching Center’s Assessment Strategies page.
• Use a time limit on the exam to restrict the amount of time students can spend taking a test once they begin it. Once the timer starts on a timed test, it cannot be paused or stopped by the student, not even if they close the test-taking window or their browser.
• Use an availability window so that all students are taking the exam during a limited date/time range.
• Use Quiz Banks to create a pool of more quiz questions than you will actually deploy on each quiz, then randomize the deployment of those questions per student, so every student has a slightly different version of the exam. See this article for step-by-step information on how to do that.
• Incorporate occasional short answer questions that prompt students to explain how they arrived at an answer for a previous objective test question.

Canvas Quiz Logs

Canvas provides a Quiz Log for every student’s quiz attempt. While Canvas does not quantify or guarantee the accuracy of these logs, they may provide some insight into each student’s interaction with the quiz. Canvas Quiz Logs can provide some information about:

• When the student started the quiz attempt
• How long the student spent answering each question and in what order
• When the student submitted the quiz attempt

Quiz Logs can be accessed via the SpeedGrader for each student’s quiz attempt by clicking the View Log link.

NOTE: Quiz logs may be utilized as a possible start to a conversation with a student, but not the end of it. These logs should not be considered definitive evidence of an academic integrity violation. There is no provision in Canvas to gather such evidence and the Teaching Center is unable to provide any additional data beyond what these logs represent.

When viewing quiz logs, instructors may see several possible statuses in the action log that gives an idea of certain student behaviors while taking the test, such as viewing questions, answering questions and removing focus from the quiz-taking page. These statuses are not an exact science and can even be misleading (e.g. testing has indicated that Canvas considers a student who does not move their mouse for more than 30 seconds to have “stopped viewing the Canvas quiz-taking page”). We advise that instructors view these statuses with a grain of salt. Canvas is not an online test proctoring system and has no way to definitively determine student behavior during a test.

Canvas Analytics

Canvas analytics features can give you some broad ideas of how students are doing in your courses, and what their patterns of logging in and viewing course content are, but these features are primarily designed to help instructors track student progress and identify at-risk students, not determine academic integrity.

The New Analytics link in your course navigation menu will take you to the Analytics dashboard. This article covers the many ways you can view analytics for an individual student in your course. Canvas analytics can give an idea of a student’s online participation, but does not provide a complete pageview-level log of a student’s activity in the course.