Itamar Tzadok

Here are some 6 counter-cents:

5. In exams this may overload the server especially towards the end when students start reviewing their answers.

6. Some students may prefer working on the answers pen&paper and only then upload them to the quiz; disabling printing (which is already done for you in secure mode) may be a problem for them.

7. I guess the rationale here is that one should not put too much grade weight on any assessment that is open for cheating. Of course if your online assignments are not open for cheating (or at least not more than your essay assignments) you can put considerable weight on them (or at least equal to that you put on essay assignments).

8. That of course depends on the type of question you use. For multiple-choice or fill-in the blank questions this may be a good approach. But then again using multiple-choice or fill-in the blank questions is probably not a very effective approach neither for learning nor for assessment.

9. If you use constructive questions it is essential to give feedback in real-time and even indicate when a correct answer is found. You may be surprised to find that your students actually try harder to solve stubborn questions. No feedback may in effect encourage cheating.

10. If you find that you have to require heavily weighted proctored exams I wonder why wasting all this energy on the online assessment. Online assessment can transform instructors and students' learning experience. If it doesn't it is just extra work with little or no value at all and thus quite a nuisance.

I've just read your blog. Thanks.

Suppose something important to you is at stake and securing it depends on successfully completing a certain assignment for which you are given no clear instructions, no means for checking and improving your work, and in addition you are told that you should not expect to succeed. What would you do?

As I see it the problem of plagiarism begins with the assignments and those who give these assignments rather than with the students. While some people will always try to cheat no matter what you do (and of course cheating is not restricted to students) many if not the majority will try harder where there are genuine prospects of success and these prospects are clearly connected to one's efforts.

It's relatively cheap and quite easy to write a new policy, develop an online tutorial for this policy and buy a turnitin subscription. It is much more difficult and expensive to raise the quality of learning materials and instruction. But there is an even more fundamental problem. A colleague of mine declined a proposal to incorporate online assessment in his course. He consulted a colleague of his who told him that she tried online quizzes but that such was the level of cheating that she had to switch to scantron and impose a final exam she had hoped to omit. So you see, when instructors think that online assessment can only be multiple-choice, which "as everyone knows" is wide open for cheating (but only online; not when given in-class ), and when they are shown examples of online assessment in which the work is creative and constructive-and so cannot be simply copied-and yet marked by the computer, they protest in response that it requires too much work from them and turn to write a new plagiarism policy, there's no reason to expect any better from students who as students are under the authority of these instructors.

Just a thought.

Not quite. The task bar is still available or you can minimize the quiz window or navigate to other applications by alt-tab. Of course you can instruct the students to have no more than 2 browser windows open at any time during the exam (the quiz info page and the quiz page) and try to invigilate that by monitoring the task bars.

Thanks for the ref to SEB.

MDL-19145 description states

Extension for Moodle quiz:
* Disables navigation to other resources in the Moodle quiz

This is not necessarily a desired feature. Consider an exam with open online book (Moodle book of course). I recently gave an online exam such that students were allowed to access certain materials located in a designated book resource on the course site. I added to the quiz links for opening the book in a popup (navigation and toolbars disabled). I blocked access to other relevant resources by grouping. Disabling navigation to other resources from the quiz should be only an option.

Workaround: Add a designated choice activity set to visible or separated groups, publish result with names and show column for unanswered. This should effectively create a list of group members without requiring you or the students to post anything. A similar effect may be achieved with a forum or a database but there students will have to post/add entry to appear in the list.