Individualized Excel-Based Exams to Prevent Students from Cheating

Abstract

The COVID19 pandemic has brought a disruption on education, especially on how courses are delivered in higher education. Higher education providers are forced to go online, irrespective of the IT infrastructure’s availability and the capability of lecturers in delivering online courses. While online learning is perceived as an opportunity for academic integrity breaches, academicians need to ensure that processes are in place to avoid students cheating, especially during the exam. This paper presents an innovative approach based on Excel spreadsheet that allows lecturers to develop individualised exam questions. The method and/or accounting policy, as well as the accounting figures in the exams are automatically tailored based on students’ identification numbers. This program also allows automatic markings for such exams. This type of exam is not perceived complicated by students; but relatively reduce the opportunity to cheat. Hence, it is suggested to be used in the future online exam environment to increase the objectivity of the exam and reliability in exam marking.

Rethinking Assessment: The Future of Examinations in Higher Education

“…In previous studies [10,11], it is shown that students taking online exams have shown lower test anxiety compared to the group with in-class exams. This is possibly due to the high flexibility in online exams, where students can face the test when they feel more prepared, and in a familiar environment with less anxiety-provoking stimuli.…”

“…In order to prevent students from collaborating, the exam can be set to have a limited login time, present questions as they answer without back-tracking, randomize exam questions/answers for different students, and change exam questions every term [42]. A study by Suryani shows that individualized questions can be successfully prepared and scored using the Excel spreadsheet for accounting students based on their student ID numbers [11].…”

Cheating of high school students in the virtual Math class

“…Despite the fact that students often believe that cheating is not acceptable behavior, many report participating in cheating (Anderman, Griesinger, & Westerfield, 1998). Male students find that there are more opportunities to cheat during online exams than female students (Suryani, 2020). Research shows that male students participate in cheating during exams more often than female students (Cizek, 1999;Dawkins, 2004; DeAndrea, Carpenter, Shulman, & Levine, 2009; Hensley, Kirkpatrick, & Burgoon, 2013), which Whitley, Nelson, & Jones (1999) confirm in their meta-analysis by reviewing the literature.…”

Enhancing ethical behavior in online exams

“…The massive need to use online forms of exams appeared suddenly, so there is little research devoted to this issue. Some appeared at the end of 2020 in response to the new challenges brought by COVID-19, focusing mainly on general ideas on how to prevent cheating (e.g., Harper, Bretag & Rundle, 2020;Suryani, 2020). Few consider trust, dialog, and awareness as potential improvement tools (e.g., Bucciol, Cicognani & Montinari, 2020).…”