Is it secure to use Microsoft Teams for quizzes?

Question

So far, at the institution I work at, we have taken our quizzes in a proctored environment. Either on paper or sometimes online. But under the prevailing scenario, we need to resort to some fully online method, where the students will appear in the quizzes from home.

Among other Learning Management Systems, Microsoft Teams is one of the possible choices. Do you think that it is safe to use Microsoft Teams for quizzes?

The quizzes comprise mostly multiple-choice and true-false questions plus some other short questions with textual answers.

Can a student try viewing the quiz source while taking the quiz which is likely to contain the correct answers for the MCQ and TF questions?

Answer 1

Assuming you mean a quiz written as a Microsoft Forms quiz and using the Teams assignment tab for submission and collation, then I believe it's robust to that particular attack, since it is literally a web form, and the marking and score generation seem to happen server side.

On the other hand there are plenty of attacks that it isn't secure to. Not least students communicating with each other, either through Teams directly (for the non-creative students) or out of band (e.g. via a mobile phone). And unfortunately both multiple choice and true-false are harder to plagiarism check than freeform text.

Answer 2

Microsoft Teams seems to utilise a wide range of security features on most of its services. including Microsoft Teams, which you can read about here: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoftteams/teams-security-guide. However, Microsoft Teams cannot prevent students from communicating in an environment external to itself – there are countless messaging services which can be used outside of the Microsoft corporation. Moreover, advanced algorithms would be needed in order to gain accurate insights into which students might be cheating through MS form comparison, and even if they were 100% accurate, you couldn't say which student was supplying answers and which was copying.

I think it is fair to say that a student would have to be more than tech-savvy to hack Microsoft Teams, but not to DM another student to find out the answer to a question.