I’m a bit mystified by all the complaints about rampant cheating on exams. You can’t ever entirely stop cheating, but you can certainly cut it to a minimum, and it’s not hard to do, either. But you have to take cheating seriously, or your students won’t.
Remember one thing: If you don’t punish cheating, more students will cheat. So if you only slap cheaters lightly on the hand, you don’t have any business complaining about cheating. You’re encouraging it. If you’re really concerned about cheating and you really want to stop or minimize it, then punish it severely. Fail the cheaters, at least on the exam, if not the class. The more severe the consequences, the less likely students are to do it.
You must make sure your students know exactly what your policy on cheating is, and what will happen to them if they cheat–and they have to know that you’re serious about your cheating policy.
Second, secure the exam. Take every precaution to see that it cannot fall into the hands of students before it is given. Don’t keep it on your hard drive at work. Instead, keep it on a flash drive that you have with you at all times, and password protect the exam file. Be present when the exam is printed (or if you use a printing service, when you give the file copy to the service and when it is delivered), take the exams as soon as they are printed, and lock them away so nobody can get to them. Tell nobody where the exams are secured. (If you think I’m being paranoid, one faculty member kept his exams locked in his filing cabinet in his office and told somebody else where they were. A student broke into his office, stole the exams, and sold them for five hundred dollars each. I know, because I wrote that exam, and we had to give the makeup version instead.)
Create more than one version of the exam (shuffling questions is fine). Before you go to the room to give the exam, have them arranged in alternating versions, and count your exams at least twice to make sure you know exactly how many you have. Know exactly how many students are in the room, and pass each exam out separately to each student; also make sure that each student has a different version than the adjacent student. Be careful that you do not accidentally give any student more than one exam. Count any remaining exams and do the math after you have passed them out and before you start the exam, just to make sure you did not accidentally give out an extra exam. If a student needs to leave the room during the administration of the exam, take his exam and all his materials while he is gone, and return them when he gets back (or don’t allow anyone to leave during the administration). Also secure the exam after it has been given. Do not allow students to pass the exam to you. You pick each one up individually, and make sure that you get an exam from every student. Before you let the students leave the room, count the exams and make sure you got every one of them. If an exam is missing, check the exams against the roster, figure out exactly which student did not give you an exam, and get it before you let the students leave the room.
Create a second exam with significantly different questions (not just shuffled questions) for any student that (for good reason, I hope) will take the exam early or late. Do not give that student the same exam you give during the regular administration.
If you give the same exams semester after semester and give exams back to students after they’ve been graded, you might as well just post the exam before they take it. Let students come to your office or room to go over their exams, but do not let them take the exam with them. If you give different exams every semester or year, you can let students take them, but because your exams are similar, it’s not the best idea.
Third, secure the exam site. If possible, spread the chairs as much as possible, or seat students in every other seat and every other row. Allow no additional materials of any kind (including dictionaries). Allow no electronic devices of any kind (no cell phones, electronic dictionaries, calculators, etc.) Have students check bags or backpacks at the front of the room and allow them only a pencil (or two) and nothing more (a piece of scratch paper is okay for certain exams, but only if you pick it up with the exams and do not allow students to take scratch paper out of the room). If you catch a student cheating, immediately pull his exam and eject him from the room. In the case of standardized exams, exam policy may override the above; I’ll address that below.
Fourth, actively proctor the exam. Don’t sit there. Don’t read. Don’t look out the window. Stay on your feet, walking up and down the aisles, watching all the students closely, and make sure they know you’re watching them and what will happen if you catch them cheating. Actively proctoring the exam probably does more to cut down on cheating than all the exam policies put together. The ratio of proctors to students in an exam room should never fall below 1:30, so if you have 40 students taking an exam, you should have two proctors in the room.
Take the exams immediately back to a secure area and lock them up. Keep them locked up unless you’re grading them. After you’ve graded them, if a student wants to look at his exam, get it out before he comes, and put it away after he leaves. Do not take it out of the locked filing cabinet (or wherever it is) while he is present so he can see where the exams are kept. A copy of an exam, graded or not, is worth a great deal of money to that student, even if he has already taken it.
When you do catch cheaters, it is imperative that you do not budge from the policy, no matter what the student’s excuse may be. If it gets out that you let a cheater off easy, more students will cheat. Be cold. Stick to your guns. The policy is absolute, and is not subject to “special conditions.” Have no sympathy. Students will not take cheating seriously if you don’t, and if you make allowances for cheaters, you’re not taking cheating seriously. If you’re the bleeding heart type, when cheaters give you sob stories, think of the students who worked their butts off studying for the exam, and how unfair it would be to them to give this little pondscum cheater a break.
If you’re proctoring a standardized exam and not your own, then the agency giving the exam will have their own policies. Make sure students know exactly what those policies are, just as you would if you were giving your own exam, and enforce them strictly. Again, proctor actively as students take the exam.
Unfortunately, you can’t do as much about cheating if your program, department, or administration won’t back you or your policies. You can still secure exams and the room, and you can still proctor actively, and that counts for a good deal. But as long as students get the message that cheating is okay, which they do every time some cheater gets off the hook easy, or teachers do little to ensure no cheating takes place, not only will they continue to cheat, but more students will follow suit.
