I swear not to cheat, your Honor

With our friend COVID-19, my entire school has been forced to move our lecture materials online. Some of the instructors I’ve talked to want someway to get the students to sign something, an Honor Code, before they take an exam. The Honor Code would say that you will not cheat, it’s you who is taking the exam, and the like. I can respect that. Even though some students are going to cheat, no matter what, it feels as though we are dotting our i’s and crossing our t’s, and doing the best that we can with an extreme situation.

So I coached one of my coworkers through an idea to do this. I’m sure there are other ways to do it as well, but I thought this one was kind of neat.

Essentially, I told him to first create his exam, create a module, and then create a quiz for your honor code. So let’s take a look at the honor code quiz first.

So first go into a quiz, name it, set it as a graded survey and write out whatever your honor code for your students is going to be:

To use the method I’m about to describe, you’ll want to assign a small amount of points (like 1 point). I’ll show you why in a hot minute.

Next, make a single questions as an Essay type. Students can put in whatever they want and there’s no ‘right’ answer. You can add in that if their name is not in the box that their exam will not be graded, etc.

MAKE SURE TO CLICK UPDATE. Then save the Survey/Quiz… thing. Go back to your module and add the Honor Code thing and the Exam into the Survey. Make sure that the Honor code portion is first.

Next, click on the three little dots at the top right corner of the module. Click ‘Edit’. Your screen will look something like this:

What we are gonna do is add two requirements. Honestly, I don’t know if one of them is required, I do know the other one is. But I like to play it safe.

So first, click Add requirement. Under ‘Student must complete one of these requirements’ first select your Honor Code survey, select ‘score at least’ and put the max points. I don’t know if its needed or not, but its a nice little touch and plays it safe. The important part is under ‘Students must complete all of these requirements.’ There’s a check box under there titled ‘Students must move through requirements in sequential order.’ So this makes it so that a student can’t get into your exam until they do the first thing. Here’s a picture of what it should look like.

You can then go into student view to double check. Here’s what they will see:

The students can’t get access to the Exam until they do the Honor Code. Neat, huh? So I wouldn’t recommend this as your ONLY means of keeping students from cheating. I recommend randomized questions, timed exams, and some other stuff that I may end up talking about sometime during the worst spring break party ever (SPRING BREAK 2020 BABY! CORONAVIRUS GOOOO!).

So with the quarantine coming sometime soon, lots of people have been hoarding. I got flour. I wanna make my own bread. Seems like other people have the same idea because there was NO YEAST at the stores. So. Little GOOGLE FU and did you know you can just use natural yeast in the flour? I’m trying it out. This is how sour dough is made:

Wanna do it? Here’s the video I watched: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0wTt8VGyBdk

Good luck out there. Stay safe.