How Problem-Attic can reduce cheating

We won't mince words: the cheating problem in schools is bad and may be getting worse. With AI making it easier to answer questions, and with the proliferation of answer-sharing websites, it’s more difficult than ever to know if you’re looking at students’ own work. This page describes features in Problem-Attic that can help—a lot!

1. Scrambling

Nearly all online testing programs do some kind of scrambling. They’ll vary the order of questions, multiple-choice answers, or both. Problem-Attic does this and more: it pulls off the highly-unusual feat of scrambling multiple-choice answers on a PDF!

You can download as many as 5 different PDF test forms in Problem-Attic, zipped up with scoring keys. If you print the various forms and pass them out, you will have made it very difficult for students to copy off one another or share answers.

The scrambling we’ve just described is done on the Make PDF tab with the Advanced button. More details are here. If you’d like to see a sample, download this zip file. It contains multiple versions of an 8th grade science test made with questions from New York State.

2. Parallel Forms

Scrambling is one way to prevent students from sharing answers. Another way is to change the questions themselves. Problem-Attic’s questions are written by humans; they’re not algorithm-based or produced by AI. But there’s plenty of variation to swap out questions, produce multiple test forms, and guard against cheating.

For EducAide’s original banks, which contain about 80,000 questions, there is a design feature which makes swapping questions even easier: they’re written in pairs. This can be a big help with security, as well as with pre- and post-tests and makeup tests. There’s also an option for switching automatically between the questions. It’s called parallel forms. Details are here.

3. Phone App

Q: What’s the best way to view student work and know it’s their own?

A: The Problem-Attic test scanner app!

The app gives you a fast and convenient way to view students’ handwritten work. It has many uses, from scoring essays and short tasks to checking on student understanding and providing feedback. It’s so efficient you can even use it to audit homework by looking at just a few key questions.

After students complete a test or assignment, they use the phone app as a page scanner. Then Problem-Attic intelligently breaks up the images so you can do student-by-student or question-by-question viewing. To learn more, see this short video. Complete instructions are here.

Note: test scanning is a subscriber option. If your school doesn’t subscribe, you can try the app in the Play Area.

4. Formatting of online tests

Nearly all online test engines work the same, by formatting questions as HTML. This practically invites students to copy questions and paste them into a search engine. Problem-Attic is different. It creates images of the questions. Originally we did this to make sure they got formatted reliably—and, we might add, beautifully!—regardless of the browser or device.

As it happens, delivering questions as images is a very effective anti-cheating measure. Students can’t copy/paste them into a search engine or find the questions on a website for “homework help”. Even with AI and character recognition, there’s no quick way to combine separate images for a stem and multiple-choice answers. This throws up a huge roadblock to students who try to take the easy route.

There’s even more good news: Problem-Attic’s formatting is the same for exports. When you deliver a quiz through Google, Canvas or Schoology you get questions formatted as images, and you get the same protections against cheating.

5. Random selection groups

This option, specifically for the Canvas LMS, discourages students from cheating and is important for other reasons: it’s an excellent way to get content into Canvas and to use the program for online/self-paced learning.

The idea behind random selection groups is to create a quiz with more questions than you want shown. Canvas picks a set at random. Then quizzes differ between students (for test security) and differ if the same student re-takes a quiz (for mastery).

What’s especially good about exporting from Problem-Attic is how well-organized are its question banks. You can drill down to specific topics (or standards) and create subparts of a document which match up with those topics. Then the quiz you create for Canvas has the groups already set up. It’s amazing! Please see for yourself in this short video.