Academic Integrity & Assessment Security in Inspera (Original)

Academic integrity focuses on equipping learners with the capabilities and values necessary to conduct ethical scholarship.

Assessment security focuses on hardening assessment against attempts to cheat, and on detecting any cheating that has occurred.

Academic Integrity

An academic integrity pledge is placed at the front of every assessment
Place a reminder on questions that students should be describing, explaining etc. in their own words. It is not ethical to cut and paste from your lecture notes or any other source, and you will not gain full marks if you do this.

Note: This is an interim measure only as more and more teaching staff are making the required shift to do assessment differently. Where possible, assessment should not contain assessment questions where it is possible to cut and paste from lecture notes or Google the answer – this is addressed in Assessment Security – Assessment design.

Specify in the task description that this is an individual piece of work (if collaboration and collusion are not permitted).
Build a referencing 'page' into the assessment modules that models or links out to information explaining the importance of correctly acknowledging sources, and how to do this.
Make "correct acknowledgement of sources" a criterion in the assessment for which students receive marks.

Assessment Security

Assessment Design

Students say they are least likely to cheat on reflections on practicums, vivas, personalised and unique tasks, and in-class tasks (Bretag et al., 2019). These assessment types can all be done in Inspera.
Technological features of Inspera allow rich assessment tasks to be created with images, videos, audio tracks and other stimulus materials. Feedback from the Inspera pilot is that it is easier to design and build more authentic, contextual assessment tasks which are less 'Googleable' therefore reducing opportunities to cheat.
Technological features of Inspera allow the re-conceptualisation of what an exam can be, meaning you can achieve identity verified assessment through exams and in-class tasks without sacrificing authentic kinds of tasks.
The number of different question types which can be combined in numerous and varied ways allows the construction of quite complex questions that can still be automatically marked. Students do limited typing with these questions so do not have the option to copy and paste (e.g., they cannot copy from Google Translate in languages courses) therefore reducing opportunities to cheat.

Cheating reduction

Single Sign-On using UQ credentials.
Learning Tool Interoperability with Blackboard – if you are not enrolled in the course, you cannot access the link to the assessment; links can have adaptive release settings etc.
Inspera Exam Portal for when we have invigilated BYOD on-campus exams; can also be used for in-class tasks which locks students in the Inspera browser where they can only access authorised resources.
Pools of questions where students do not receive the same question, or the order of questions is randomised; multiple versions of the same question are easily created; different versions of the assessment are relatively easy to set up.

Cheating Detection

Monitor module and activity logs in Inspera – you can see if students have spent a suspiciously short amount of time (i.e., copying, not reading, thinking, deliberating over a choice) on an assessment.
Document properties in File Upload questions.
Turnitin Integration on Essay and File Upload questions.
Question allocation in marking – it is easier for markers to detect if students have colluded because they are marking the responses of every student for that question.

Exam Security

Inspera Exam Portal addresses the need for protected exam security, test-taker convenience, and assistance. It gives you administrative flexibility for both onsite Bring-Your-Own-Laptop (BYOL) exams and home exams.
Inspera Smarter Proctoring includes advanced monitoring of test-takers via webcam and screen sharing technology - either fully automated, human proctored, or combined.

For noting

The more of the above strategies you combine, the greater degree of assessment security you can achieve.
These strategies are discussed and promoted at workshops, and other ‘teaching conversations’ around the University.
Work done in the Inspera pilot has also been flagged for creating case stories that demonstrate how Inspera has been used by academics to promote academic integrity and increase assessment security.