While online learning has myriad benefits, there’s one large problem: how to prevent cheating online. 

Preventing cheating in online courses is challenging for a variety of reasons, including limited supervision, technological advancements, pressures to succeed, and a lack of awareness of academic integrity policies. 

There are several common reasons why learners may cheat in online courses. Learners want to do well or need to achieve a certain score to pass, so they’ll look for a backdoor solution to get the score they need. One additional pressure may be the online environment itself. It’s often hard to stay motivated when learning by yourself at a computer screen, so shortcuts seem even more tempting.

Conversely, cheating sometimes occurs because learners may not see any consequence. They may be unaware that the instructor uses anti-cheating or plagiarism-checking software to check their work. In addition, perhaps the academic integrity classroom policies are unclear. You may have assumed learners would never cheat and therefore neglected to include a clear policy for the punishment of doing so.

Preventing cheating in online courses for children requires a combination of strategies, including clear communication about academic integrity, effective monitoring and detection, and proactive efforts to prevent cheating. It also requires collaboration between educators, parents, and learners to ensure everyone is committed to upholding academic integrity.

Not preventing cheating has serious implications. You won’t be able to gain a clear assessment of their abilities. Plus, learners will be unable to demonstrate their learning in other scenarios. Letting learners get away with passing scores can reflect poorly upon your future credibility, too. 

While there’s no silver bullet to solving this problem, here are a few of the steps you can take to mitigate it.

How to Prevent Cheating 

1. Build a culture of academic honesty

Academic integrity ensures fairness, promotes learning, protects credibility, and fosters personal integrity. To start, be sure learners understand what cheating is and why it’s wrong. You could include this in your first unit and make learners acknowledge that they’ve read and understood the policy to hold them accountable. You can even add a discussion forum where students discuss why they think cheating happens and what the consequences could be. Having it out in the open will make it feel socially unacceptable to cheat. 

1. Design questions that require personal reflection 

It’s hard to cheat when you’re asked to write from personal experience. Ask learners to give examples from their lives in answer to a question. This can work beyond just writing and reading courses. Ask learners for their opinions on whatever your course topic may be, and how they plan to apply that knowledge to the real world. It’s hard for learners to share personal answers, and finding a similar answer online requires enough knowledge of the subject matter to identify the correct example.

2. Use assessment strategies that make cheating difficult

Cheating becomes more tempting the higher the stakes are. Making a single test worth half the learner’s final grade can make even well-intentioned folks crack under the pressure. Instead of one big exam, create smaller micro-quizzes throughout the course. A 5-question review quiz isn’t significant enough for learners to try to cheat. And a confident learner who has passed review quizzes won’t risk cheating for a grade they think they can earn.

3. Offer open-book exams

Prevent learners from searching on Google by letting them use the class materials. Even better: encourage them. Create more difficult questions that are specific to your course topic and would be hard to find online. Your students will still have to research in the book to find the answers they’re looking for—a process that challenges their critical thinking and leads to a richer learning experience. As a bonus, your learners will gain some practical knowledge of how to effectively search for information.

4. Implement technical safeguards

If you suspect a student plagiarizes a written assignment, run it through a plagiarism checker. Randomize quizzes by creating a large question bank. Randomized quizzes prevent students from sharing answers with each other. Set a timer on quizzes so learners who take too long to look up answers won’t have time to finish. Together, these measures make it hard for an individual to cheat without help from multiple peers. And, if you’ve created a culture of integrity, they won’t reach out and ask. 

LearnDash Integrity 

One of the best ways to prevent cheating and protect the integrity of your online course is through the LearnDash Integrity add-on. Here are a few of the preventative tools included: 

• Prevent Hotlinking. Hotlinking is the act of stealing someone’s bandwidth or server resources by linking directly to their website’s assets, such as images or videos. Preventing hotlinking can crack down on learners sharing lesson material with others. 
• Prevent Concurrent Login. Concurrent login is when one user with a single username and password logs in at the same time from a different location or device. With this prevention in place. Whenever someone else logs in under the same username/email while the learner is also logged in, they will get an error prompt. This prevents users from sharing logins. Of course, you can also choose to have certain user roles excluded from this feature if needed.
• Prevent Content Copy. This option disables the “Copy” and “Paste” functions on your website, in addition to the entire right-click functionality. Although this is not a foolproof method to prevent copying, this may discourage users from copying and pasting content from your course website.

Protect Your Courses Today 

If you employ all the above strategies, you won’t make cheating impossible, but you will make it impractical. Improve the success and enjoyment of your course by engaging learners from the start and promoting a culture of integrity. LearnDash is here to help make your classes more secure. Try out the LearnDash Integrity feature in our demo experience.