Preventing leaking exam papers/cheating using phone cameras?

Question

I work at an educational institution where exam papers are considered protected. Leaking the exam question sheet and taking photocopies or camera shots is considered illegal and is strictly prohibited. I am not here to argue about this policy but to ask about the best ways to enforce it. Students have been taking pictures of exam papers during exam time, leaking them to subsequent sessions or posting them with solutions and often selling them to students of subsequent semesters. Though we don't use the same questions between semesters, they do exhibit some similarities at times for some courses.

Even with strict invigilation and requests not to bring cell phones to the exam room, there have been some incidents. Lockers are out of the question, as is collecting all cell phones before exam time. I would welcome any suggestions.

Answer 1

I'm going to be a bit harsh and say that your cause is doomed to fail if you want to solve the problem just by policing students.

What happened is that some factors contributed to atmosphere where it is considered advantageous to have a copy of past exams and your students are motivated enough to risk getting a copy. The tradition of having a monetary incentive makes things even worse.

At my previous university, I had opportunity to witness the evolution of hi-tech copying systems. At first, nobody was checking for cell-phones because they had bad cameras and weren't as popular, then cell-phone copying became popular. Then cell-phone detectors of various levels of sophistication came into use. After that, cheaters moved on to other devices.

Today, spy devices are cheap and commonly available and they are next logical step from cell-phone cameras. Are you going to start checking your student's watches next? How about buttons, glasses or even pens? What about say calculators (OK, that one in particular isn't the best example, but if there's demand, supply will come), whose use might even be allowed in some examinations? Are you going to have a spy-equipment expert on your staff to check what your students are using? What if they home-brew some equipment?

What if someone actually steals a physical copy of questions? That actually happened at my previous school. Guy (not a student at the school) came to a lecture hall where an examination was being conducted, waited for TAs to hand out the questions and then proceeded towards the exit with a question sheet, running over anyone who tried to stop him. There was even a recording from video-surveillance of him doing the deed and a wanted poster was placed at the school entrance, but it didn't do any good. That particular problem was solved by asking for IDs before handing out questions, but it shows the trend of escalation that can happen.

Next, what if a group of students organizes with the idea of memorizing questions in detail without any technological aids? There's literally no way of preventing that.

The more you press the anti-technological/anti-cheating offensive without taking away the incentive to cheat, the greater is the risk that you'll instead form a core of semi-professional cheaters who will have connections to the sources of appropriate cheating equipment and serve as a cadre which will train future generations and make problem even worse. For example, in my hometown, a sure way to detect presence of a higher education institution is the high concentration of flyers advertising rent and sales of spy equipment.

The only sure way (that I at least can think of) to solve the problem is to cut it at its source and take away the incentive to have the pictures of past exams. Try to take time to analyze all factors that could lead to such behavior and see if you can actually affect any of them in a meaningful way. Although questions aren't repeated, it's obvious from the response of students that seeing past exams is beneficial in some way. It's normal for questions to be similar, since there are probably some underlying concepts that students should learn and that knowledge needs to be tested. If the students are already aware of what they're going to find at the exam, then there isn't much need to see how exactly the sheet with questions looks like. If the exams is supposed to be a surprise, then you should reconsider if you're actually preparing your students properly for the exam.

If going in-depth when solving a problem such as this isn't real motive, then it would be best to take advice from Moriarty's answer. You'll be doing something "direct" and you probably won't challenge existing policies too much.

Answer 2

This is not the answer you want but I have to get it out of my chest. (My background is engineering).

The best, most effective and easiest way to completely avoid students taking pictures of exams, selling them and making a profit out of that is:

Publish online all previous exams as an exercise book.

The questions in an exam and the exercises done before the exam should not be more different than an exam and a previous exam, actually old exams make for perfect exercises and practice.

The point is that studying the courses and making a few exams/exercises to practice should be easier and lead to greater success than checking the whole compilation of past exams, which should anyway lead to a good knowledge of the contents of the course (in a more tedious way than reading the theory and checking this with a few exams).

Personal story: When I was in high-school the homework would be much harder than the exams, anyone making the homework (optional) would get good qualifications and the qualifications would reflect actual good knowledge about the subject. In the university there were exercises, but they were explanatory and very basic, the questions in the exam were much harder. This made the exercises useless, students needed exams from previous years just to practice in answering the questions, and I hated that.

Answer 3

Make the punishment for being caught well-known. Make every effort possible to track down the perpetrators, and make the offence and punishment publicly known.

You could set up one or two cheap cameras to take high-resolution photographs at set intervals, say every 15 seconds (making sure it's all kosher legally, and warning the students). I know that Canon compact cameras "hacked" with the CHDK software can do this. Don't use an SLR, they have noisy shutters. If you find out an exam has been leaked, you should be able to comb the archive and catch the perpetrator. Yes, it's an extreme solution -- but also a scare tactic.

Cell phone detectors are another possibility to catch offenders in the act, though by no means foolproof. Turning on airplane mode would render them useless.

Make offending harder by confiscating cell phones at the start of the exam. This won't stop pre-meditated offending, though -- you can't do pat-downs!

Yes, you claim this is out of the question. But I am truly surprised that this is not an institutional policy to collect all cell phones before an exam. Put this back into the question. My undergraduate institution also had a substantial fine (NZD $70, IIRC) for the owner of a cell phone that rang during the exam. It should go without saying that phones must be turned off.

Place a subtle random symbol somewhere on each exam paper, that is unique to each individual.

Your average none-too-bright cheater might not take much notice of a "⎋" symbol in the corner of a page. But, it would be a pain to implement for a large class and will only work until someone catches on.

Answer 4

When designing the exam paper, place fewer items per page. To reduce paper waste, this can be achieved by using A5-size exam papers, created by putting two exam papers on a single sheet, then cutting the pages in half. This will not prevent students from taking photographs, but it will mean that each photo they take will be obtaining less information about your exam. The student will need to take their camera out more often to get the whole exam, increasing the chances that your proctors, who should be watching the room carefully, will catch them.

Answer 5

I had a professor that solved this problem nicely when I was in college. This is all based on what he did.

1. Before the Final, tell the all the periods that everyone is getting the same test. And that all the grades will be scaled across all periods. If the second period class does better than the first period class, it will suck to be in the first period when the mean will be substantially higher.
2. Repeat this warning on the day of the test.
3. Hand out a substantially different test to the 2nd period students.

Yes, he lied to all the students, but he had watched the 2nd period Antennas class consistently score higher than the 1st period.

I've met people that had that second class, they studied our test exclusively and more than one of them lost 2 letter grades in their final class grade over it. Studying the other test exclusively wasn't a problem for this teacher after that.

His tests were deep in theory and derivation of where the equations come from, and Antennas is a very complicated subject. Might not work with all classes, but when word of this kind of apocalypse gets out, it will live in the history of the folklore for many years.

Answer 6

To prevent questions being copied from one test period to another is relatively "simple"—just make sure that classes taking the same test take it at the same time. (This requires some central planning of course, but should be something the university would in principle approve of.)

As for the use of cell phones, we take care of that by making sure that students can't access them during the exam. Because our protocols require a "gap row" between students taking the exam, that gives us an extra row of desks. We ask the students to put their extra materials in the gap rows. That way it's immediately obvious if students start reaching for the materials, because they have to stand up or visibly get out of their seat to access them.

In addition, it is announced that cell phones are not allowed material, and that any violation of the exam regulations results in an automatic failing grade. (Thus, any use of a cell phone gets you in trouble.)

Answer 7

Exam questions can be shuffled, or reparameterized (being careful to make both versions equally difficult) to obtain at least 2 versions of the same exam.

But don't mark them version A/B. Let the cheater try to figure that out.

Start playing this game early. Do it on quizzes and midterms.

This doesn't eliminate cheating, but may make it not worth the trouble.

If you think there might be spies within your department who are leaking the exams, give one version of the exam to the assistants to photocopy, and say nothing about an alternate version. Photocopy the alternate exam version yourself, and substitute at time of test. You won't be questioned about wasting trees, but if you are, say you thought there was an error in the test or that it didn't cover things with the correct weight, and you wanted to correct that.

It is a bit of work, but it is not 2x or 3x the work and if it seems like it is, rethink what to change. A side benefit is a larger pool of example questions is generated as time goes by.

Alternative: Make the exam open book, no time limit (i.e. this should take about 3 hours but you have all weekend if you need it), and the questions impossible, like what you would expect at Caltech or MIT. Contraindications: Requires working honor system; honor.

Answer 8

Do you have the option of conducting the exams centrally? At my institution, all final exams and major mid-semester exams were conducted at the same time for all students, under the supervision of external monitors.

Any person who was seen using a phone or unauthorised notes would be guilty of serious misconduct, and likely get zero for the exam at the very least. Similarly, no person was permitted to leave the room until all papers had been collected, so it wasn't possible for the question sheets to go walkabout.

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Unfortunately, that will be difficult if there's not institutional support for it. (Although I'm constantly amazed to find out that it's not the norm elsewhere.)

What I have seen work in the past, though, is to use subtly different question sheets for different students. On numerical exams it's easy enough to change a few numbers, but people who intend to copy answers out probably won't notice the difference.

Of course, that won't help if there's later sessions of the same exam, but honestly that's not something that should be happening at university level anyway. No technical solution is going to be able to stop students from talking.

Answer 9

I am not here to argue about this policy but to ask about the best ways to enforce it.

Like some of the other excellent answers, I am going to argue about this policy as I do not see a good way to enforce it.

Like many other institutions (entertainment industry, telegraph ) you are clinging to an old model in the face of overwhelming technology and a client base (students) that simply don't care about your rules (copying exams is not illegal: your institution is not the government and cannot enact laws).

Focusing on cellphones will accomplish nothing. I have a high-res camera in my laptop that is smaller than a shirt button. While I personally cannot hide it under my hairline, many 20 year olds can. See other answers (or amazon.com) for more places to hide a camera.

Your end goal seems to be to reduce cheating, meaning knowing the answer to question 17 before going into the test. You reduce cheating by making the contents of question 17 irrelevant because everyone gets a different question 17.

Any decent-size institution will have a large question bank built up over the years. Digitize it if you haven't done so already, and get the IT department to make a system that prints out 200 different tests with questions drawn at random from the database. Randomize the order. If you want to be really fancy, have the system randomize values if that is appropriate. This is not a complex process, I would probably quote you delivery within a week excluding the questions themselves.

Administration will probably whine about running costs, but there are none. Printing used to cost more than copying but today it's exactly the same machine.

So, 200 students each getting a different set of 50 questions drawn from 1000 in a random order with random values -> copying any particular test is of no value to others and the problem largely goes away.

Answer 10

In many jurisdictions student's answers are his/her intellectual property and he/she is legally entitled to copy and reproduce them. You need to consult with local lawyer ASAP, because your institution may actually be asking you to prevent students from exercising their rights.

(I do understand that students transfers some of their rights to the institution. But depending on local laws, some rights cannot be transferred nor relinquished, like the right to make a copy for personal use. There is also a possibility that university might have no rights at all to student's work - until he/she submits it.)

Answer 11

If a student submits the same essay for two courses they get into big trouble.

Therefore why are you allowing your staff to cheat the system and not do the work they are paid to do by using the same exam for more than one presentation of the course?

The solution is to remove any member of your staff that are too lazy to do the job they are paid to do.

And then publish all past exams, as is done for every exam I have taken in the UK, for some reason the UK does not allow the same lazy and cheating by it’s university staff.