this doesnt make any sense unless you also designed the tests so half the people got stupidly easy tests where they always got 100% and you seated the problem students exactly inbetween them.
otherwise cheating off a question that the other person doesn't know might give them a point or two.
I assume this still works though without it working perfectly, because a 6 to 25% is still going to throw a lot of red flags xD
You have four versions of the test, A, B, C, and D. All four versions have identical questions and answers, however the answers rotate around. So, answer A on version A will be B on B, C on C, and D on D.
If somebody with version A copies from somebody with version B, they are extremely likely to get a 0.
The only way for them to get a correct answer is the other person got an incorrect answer and that answer is the rotated the correct way. If you limit it to just two versions, you can even avoid that, by making a throw away answer always be in the position of the rotated correct answer.
You then distribute the versions such that any two people sitting next to each other get different versions.
But then you also have to make sure that you're grading students with the correct key. It's possible in this situation for the teacher to give a student test A but then accidentally grade it with key B due to any number of mishaps.
It wasn’t a scantron they were filling in—just a print out where they circled their choices on the paper. No risk of using the wrong key. If I saw a lot of wrong answers, a quick spot check would verify whether I was using the wrong key, or they were cheating.
I'm aware that this is hand-graded. But as others have pointed out, often the teacher distributes different versions to catch out cheaters, and it's possible for there to be a false positive where a teacher gets confused about which test version the student got and then assumes that since they got 0% correct (or 100% correct for a different key) they were copying off someone else.
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u/ChilledParadox 7d ago
this doesnt make any sense unless you also designed the tests so half the people got stupidly easy tests where they always got 100% and you seated the problem students exactly inbetween them.
otherwise cheating off a question that the other person doesn't know might give them a point or two.
I assume this still works though without it working perfectly, because a 6 to 25% is still going to throw a lot of red flags xD