The impact of the web on assessment

glawrie's picture
Submitted by glawrie on Wed, 02/29/2012 - 11:13am

Forums:

Is anyone else currently ‘battling’ with the impact of students using online resources/social network sites to share answers to assessment tasks? Our issues include:

  • Summative quiz questions placed on websites (eg Answers.com) which supply the answers.
  • Sharing of questions and answers to Quizzes and lab assessment through a private facebook group where students in the course can join through invitation (this is very recent and involved >60% of enrolled students in a large 1st yr chem course, we could only access the group ourselves through a friendly student's login at the end of semester).
  • Recycled written research reports between semesters (detected by turnitin).

The obvious solution seems to be to minimise the summative value of all assessment that can be easily breached but our experiences indicate that the students are then less likely to attempt assessment which has low value in marks. This means they will skip activities that are useful in supporting their learning. We are reintroducing the supervised mid-semester exam in 2012 to attempt to keep some assessment-based motivator for study.
Surely we are not alone in this campaign (it does seem like a battle to stay one step ahead) and I would be interested in hearing how other people are tackling these issues in chemistry and whether they have found ways to improve academic integrity.
In fact, we think that the student-initiated facebook group could become a great peer support hub if we knew how to catalyse it (I am sure that if it became a formal course activity created by the coordinator, it would not be as popular) so any suggestions there would be welcomed.

kieran_lim's picture

kieran_lim

Wed, 02/29/2012 - 1:39pm

We have low-value quizzes and very strong statisitcal data over a few years that ATTEMPTING the quizzes is correlated with the final unit performance.
Firstly i push the idea that if they "cheat" in the quiz, they are cheating themsleves, as they get multiple attempts to get feedback. if they "cheat", then the feedback is meaningless and their exam preparation suffers -- the exam is worth a lot more. While marks are assigned to the quiz, I sell the idea that the quiz marks REWARD on-time revision.
Secondly, the quizzes come from a question bank so even if they build up lists of questions and answers, it is a lot of work to find the particular question and the particular answer.
But as you note, the hard work is getting the students to actually do the low-value quiz.
Kieran

Madeleine Schultz's picture

Madeleine Schultz

Thu, 03/01/2012 - 5:56pm

Hi Gwen,
There was a really good talk about this at the ACSME conference last September; you can read it here
http://escholarship.usyd.edu.au/journals/index.php/IISME/article/viewFil...
Abstract: This paper describes a relatively new, but rapidly expanding, cause for concern for academics and administrators, that of students plagiarizing by using online auctions, a practice also known as “contract cheating”. The prevention and detection of such plagiarism in the context of science education presents particular difficulties. The paper suggests possible methods to minimize the number of occurrences, ensuring that as few students cheat as possible, and describes various techniques to aid in the detection of those that do.

 

They actually suggested finding the requests for answers from their own students, bidding for and answering them on the on-line auction - and putting in a key term that would allow them to prove that it was their answer (ie to prove which student had been guilty). All this subterfuge is unnecessary with QUT students, though - if i put an assignment answer into google, I can sometimes find the request on Answers.com or wherever - with their student name! I can then find them in the QUT system....

 

:)