Preventing academic misconduct

• Creating online examinations can require greater effort. This, however, is offset by a considerably simplified marking procedure.
• Examinations are currently being conducted online in response to the pandemic, requiring a lot of effort and patience from everyone involved.
• Not every type of examination task can be translated into a digital format. Some will require creativity.

• Have students submit a declaration, a statutory declaration in lieu of an oath, or a signed statement assuring their academic integrity. You can find a template here.
• Make it clear that attempts to cheat can be tracked via the exam change log. (Verified cases of attempted cheating will receive a 5.0 and cannot be withdrawn.)
• Discuss your solutions and check the technical and content aspects with your colleagues. Ensure the confidentiality of the tasks.
• Organize a trial run with the students to ensure that the software works as expected.
• Inform your students about the type and range of the examination, e.g. the task type and available support.
• Work out the steps for the formal process of registration, submission and marking of the examinations.
• Take advantage of the ZiLL support services if you need assistance.

• For multiple-choice questions, vary the answer position, i.e. display the choices in a random order.
• Leave the arrangement of questions to chance, so far as this is appropriate and possible. You can also limit random selection to one section.
• Randomly assign students a selection of tasks from a larger pool of questions. If necessary, use sections to create an examination structure based on content, to regulate task difficulty and the number of points (ONYX exam) or distribute different exam variants (upload exam).
• Make sure that questions that are logically linked (corollary) are not arranged randomly (e.g. questions with multiple components).
• Do not give (unintentional) hints about other parts of the examination in a question, unless you ensure a fixed and linear structure so that the hint is guaranteed to be about a question that appears later.
• If possible, integrate variables into the task whose values can be chosen at random. This would allow you to set questions with different problems and solutions within one task (for more information, see MAXIMA). The range and increment of the variables can be pre-set to ensure appropriate tasks and results
• Inform your students that discussing solutions amongst themselves is not worthwhile because of differences in task assignment.

• Design your examination with transfer tasks, meaning you should create tasks that test comprehension, application, analysis and evaluation.
• Examples for task formulation:
  • ‘Apply the principles...’, ‘Show that...’, ‘Explain why...’, ‘Analyze...’, ‘Put...in a logical order’, ‘Discuss...’, ...
• Don’t just test how well students memorize factual knowledge.
• Ask for comparisons or evaluations.
• Make use of ‘best choice questions’ where possible. This means all options are correct, but one solution fits better than the others.

• Allow the use of specific material (such as lecture notes, a selection of resources [also used in the lectures], calculators) and integrate these into the examination questions.
• Create open-book examinations that encourage students not only to reproduce knowledge, but also to logically link information. They should also be able to filter important information and give reasons for their answers.
• Make sure that the assessment criteria are transparent and keep your questions concise and clear.

You can find more guidelines on open-book examinations by clicking on this external link.

• Formulate short and clear tasks.
• Inform the students about the assessment criteria.
• If possible, make the estimated time and amount of points per task clear to your students.
• The time period for the online examinations should not be any longer than if the exams were to take place on site. However, you should allow extra time for printing, scanning and uploading if you have opted for an upload examination.
• If appropriate, set a linear progression for the examination to prevent students from returning back to previous questions. In this case, inform your students about the layout of the exam so that they can allocate their time appropriately.
• If your questions build on each other, please remember to provide all the information for the task. If necessary, enter the information in the sections.
• Set a tight time frame for the examination to discourage students from looking for answers in other documents.
• For multiple-choice tasks, provide a sufficient number of answer options to decrease the likelihood of guessing.
• Find plausible distractors (false answers).
• Prohibit the insertion of text (‘copy and paste’) in writing tasks, if necessary. This is not recommended for long answer texts, as it means the student cannot restructure their text.