An Integrated Approach to Preempt Cheating on Asynchronous, Objective, Online Assessments in Graduate Business Classes

Abstract

Cheating, left untended, erodes the validity of evaluation and, ultimately, corrupts the legitimacy of a course. We profile an approach to manage, with an eye toward preempting, cheating on asynchronous, objective, online quizzes. This approach taps various technological and social solutions to academic dishonesty, integrating them into a technology-centered, socially-sensitive pedagogy. The resulting design engages a battery of technology tools, within a social context moderated by the testing effect, to minimize the practicality, productivity, and hence, students’ propensity to cheat. Operationally, we used the Canvas LMS to generate a differentiated series of objective quizzes from question banks holding several hundred potential items. We assess cross-sectional data from 178 MBA students spanning eight online-only classes. The results support the effectiveness of an integrated blend of technology tools and social methods to encourage students’ consciousness of the resulting uselessness of cheating. We review the implications of the results to test anxiety, student engagement, learning effectiveness, and workflow efficiency.