Becky Hirta is thinking about exams:
For the giant calculus class I’m starting to write multiple choice questions. For a class like that, really the only issues for me to consider about the final are how to avoid cheating (change the order of the MC questions and the numbers in the long-answer), how to make that many copies before the copier breaks, and how to get it graded efficiently.
We don’t teach large classes here– even the intro mechanics course is broken down into multiple small sectiosn, so the largest class I’ve had to teach has been about 20– but this did remind me of a great cheating-prevention story that I heard at DAMOP a year or so ago.
A faculty member at a large state university was giving a multiple-choice exam to a large class, and said in class before the day of the exam “Don’t even think about cheating, because there will be four different versions of the final, and you’ll be copying off somebody with a different version than you have.”
On the day of the test, he passed out the exams, which were printed on four different colors of paper.
So, as you would expect, some of the students copied the answers from other people with the same color test.
The thing was, the paper color had nothing to do with the exam version. Each of the four versions had been printed on all four colors of paper, so they had exactly the same chance of copying from the wrong version as if they had all been the same.
OK, it’s not really a cheating prevention story, so much as a cheating detection/ mess-with-the-heads-of-cheaters story, but I really like this idea. I don’t know if it’s really true, but it’s good fun.
So, does anybody else know any really good ways to mess with cheating students?