Introduction
In this blog post, we will explore three practical strategies that can help educators ensure academic honesty and foster a fair learning environment. In today's digital age, educators face the challenge of maintaining academic integrity, especially when it comes to online assessments. With the widespread use of Google Workspace in educational settings, it becomes crucial to implement effective measures to prevent students from cheating.
We are all very aware that cheating is not something that is going to go away. We are all guilty of bending some rules and not always following them to some extent. When we are working with students, we have an obligation to teach good ethics and a set of rules to them. Even with putting in so much effort, we understand that it is almost impossible to eliminate cheating, especially when the learning process has gone online. However, we can still prevent students from cheating in Google Classroom.
While Google Classroom can make a teacher's life easier, offering a quick system to make assessments and tests creates an opportunity to cheat. You can still take some precautions that can restrict students in Google Classroom and prevent cheating. We will look into some ways to prevent cheating and see if teachers are able to track and detect cheating on Google Classroom.
Ways to Prevent Students from Cheating in Your School's Google Workspace for Education
You need to get proactive and identify cheating patterns in online quizzes and assignments. You can use several features offered by Google Classroom to prevent cheating.
Shuffle answer choices
Visit Google Classroom and select the "Quizzes" option from the list. Add the standard rules and deadlines and then proceed to Google Forms to take the quiz. Once you have all the multiple-choice questions ready, click on the bottom right to find the "shuffle option order". This option will entirely randomize the structure of your answer choices for your questions.
Shuffling the order of the answers will make it very difficult for students to cheat. Screen creepers will find it hard to cheat work from other students.
Enable Locked Quiz Mode
Locked quiz mode is another tool that can stop students from cheating in Google Classroom. This will help you protect the integrity of your assessments. This can be enabled in Google Forms and restrict students from using external resources.
If you use this mode, you will restrict your students from accessing external resources while taking a quiz on Google Classroom. This mode will automatically disable the students’ apps, extensions, tabs, and screenshot functions. These functions are disabled throughout the quiz and restrict students in Google Classroom.
You have the option of turning on this feature before assigning the assessment to the students through Google Classroom. Locked mode is one of the many tools teachers use to prevent their students from cheating in the school's Google Workspace for Education.
Broadening the Structure of Questions
You shouldn't limit yourself to multiple-choice questions because the same pattern can still help students identify the pattern and cheat in the class. Broadening the structure of questions can make it hard to cheat and help you test your students' knowledge more effectively.
You can consider options like matching questions, sequencing questions, video questions, reading passages, images questions, etc. Also You can use a checkbox grid question type to ask your students to arrange items in a list in a sequence question. You can also use pictures for subjects like mathematics or social studies.
This will make the assessment complex and hard for screen creepers to cheat from fellow students.
Can Google Classroom Track and Student Cheating?
With all these ways to prevent cheating in Google Classroom, a question arises: can Google Classroom track cheating? Is it even possible for teachers to get notified if their students are cheating? Well, the answer is no. Google Classroom uses Google Forms to prepare quizzes and assessments, and the latter has no such functionality to track cheating.
If schools or teachers wish to use a third party along with this platform, there are chances to track the cheating patterns. You can integrate third-party apps with Google Classroom to monitor cheating but the platform does not offer this functionality. So, in a nutshell, teachers won't be notified regarding cheating on Google Classroom.
But let's not forget that students cheat in quizzes and on their assignments, and Google Classroom can track that. When teachers run students' assignments through plagiarism checkers, they can come across any plagiarism or similarity by comparing it with content available elsewhere on the internet. Plagiarism checkers will show teachers the authenticity of a student’s assignments, which can easily help them track cheating.
So the answer to the question "Can Google Classroom track Cheating?" is yes and no. It varies with the type of assignments and quizzes.
Conclusion
Cheating is a serious problem, and with the introduction of technology in learning spaces, it has become harder to stop students from cheating. There are still many ways to prevent students from cheating in Google Classrooms, and if teachers implement these ways, they restrict students. They can also track the cheating done in submitted assignments by running them through a plagiarism checker on Google Classroom.
About Safe Doc
Safe Doc smooths the way for schools managing Google Workspace for Education features that Google Admin Console doesn't provide. Safe Doc protects your students from inappropriate content and prevents your students from misusing certain features to disrupt classrooms. With Safe Doc, you can configure how your students are allowed to use Google Workspace for Education features. It restricts searching obscene images, documents, videos from the web, blocks time-consuming games, and blocks students sharing inappropriate files to ensure a productive and best learning environment.
