Effective and Efficient Strategies and Their Technological Implementations to Reduce Plagiarism and Collusion in Nonproctored Online Exams

Abstract

Advanced digital technologies and social media have greatly improved both the learning experience and the assessment convenience, while inadvertently facilitated potential plagiarism and collaborative cheating at the same time. In this article, we will focus on the strategies and their technological implementations to run exams, or in-class tests similar to the nature of an exam. Our aim is to defeat potential student plagiarism or collusion as much as possible, while not consuming more than a tolerable amount of time and efforts on the teaching team as a whole. For the most vulnerable online, open-book, and nonproctored exams, we thus propose to limit the reading and answering of each main or section question to a strictly allocated amount of time questionwise, and we forbid returning to any previous questions that are already completed, or expired, to greatly reduce the time window for potential plagiarism and collusion. An equally important design goal here is that the relevant implementation, maintenance, deployment, exam management, answer retrieval, and marking should in principle be made sufficiently efficient to be handled completely just by the relevant subject instructor(s), at least after the initial development.