Am I obliged to tell students that there are different versions of the exam?

Question

This past term, I was teaching in a collaborative classroom where students sit together at round tables. This works well for in-class activities and peer learning, but is the not exactly the best configuration on the day of a midterm or final.

Concerned that some students might have wandering eyes – either inadvertently, or perhaps even intentionally – I came up with something that might help. Several of the exam questions required some basic arithmetic, so I made three different copies of the exam, where the numbers in the word problems varied a little bit. (Each version's problem was solved the same way, but the end result would be different.)

Later, I was talking with my daughter about what I had done. She asked me if I told the students that not everyone was getting the exact same test. (I had not.) She told me about some classes she had taken where the instructor had done this same thing, but announced it ahead of time (saying something like, "There's no sense trying to copy an answer from a neighbor, because the problems vary.") She also said that one instructor had gone so far as to print the exams on different colored sheets of paper. (My daughter assumed that all the orange tests were the same, all the blue tests were the same, etc., but that was just conjecture.)

If this makes any difference, there was already one cheating incident (or a class project) earlier in the term.

Also, I realize that it's often the "Show your work" part of an exam question that is the most important part, but that's not the case for this particular course. It's an introductory programming course, and I give small snippets of code, asking, "What does the output of this program look like?" So, for some of these questions, it would be very easy to copy an answer from another student's exam.

This made me wonder:

• Am I under any obligation to share with my students the fact that there are multiple versions of the exam? Or is it okay to remain silent about the issue?
• Is there any good reason for doing it one way or the other?

Answer 1

At some point you need to tell the students. You do not want students leaving the exam and then talking about the answers and being totally confused. For example, it is not uncommon to hear a student ask after an exam, did you get 1 kg for problem 2. If the problems are different, this is going to make the discussions confusing and prevent the students from learning after the exam. Telling them on the way out of the exam room is often not feasible, so telling them in advance is probably better.

I would also suggest instead of slightly changing the questions, is probably not the best idea. It can lead to complaints that one exam was easier/harder than another. Further, if you provide solutions, it is much more difficult since you need to pair the solution to the exact problem. An alternative for reducing cheating is to mix up the order of the questions such that one student might get 1-2-3-4-5 and another gets 5-4-3-2-1. Then students can talk about the "train problem" and the "coin flipping problem" and not question 1 or question 2.

Answer 2

Making different versions of the exam is standard practice in a lot universities when physical barriers against cheating are not available, when students take the test in different moments or with take away exams or homework.

Provided that difference of versions is not noticeable at first sight, not telling the students in advance won't harm honest students, but it will make dishonest students to unsuccessfully cheat in a way that will be easily noticeable - probably some students will produce the answer to their neighbours'questions. Therefore, I don't see an ethical problem in not telling them.

In the end it depends on what is your goal: If you want to catch dishonest students cheating, don't tell them, but if you prefer discouraging dishonest students from trying to cheat, tell them. When faced with that dilemma I usually choose the later.

Of course, by telling them you will give cheaters some useful information on how to cheat, but that should be addressed in another way.

Answer 3

A trick I have seen used, and plan to put in practise where suitable, is to make students use (parts of) a unique identifying number as the initial factor or exponent in the question.

For example, universities often have nine-digit student numbers which are ideal for being encoded in a computer science or mathematics question, especially where it is knowledge of a process or algorithm being tested, or the answers can be easily formulated from just the number provided the techniques applied are correct and accurate.

This allows students to study or even work together on an assignment/test, speaking generally about techniques and concepts that are relevant, without being able to directly share answers unless they do all the work together - in which case you have explicit collusion. In my experience this is a lot easier to find and a lot easier to penalise - because you can never quite judge whether Student A was exposing answers or Student B was copying without their knowledge, or that they had a system going, if they simply present the same answers from the same question.

Answer 4

There are two possible motivations for your actions:

1. You wish to catch and punish students who you suspect to be cheating.

2. You want to disincentivize students from cheating, as they will learn more by studying and taking the exam on their own.

If your main goal is 2 (which I believe to be a better motivation), then surely the best course of action is to tell the students far ahead of time that there will be several different versions of the exam and that it will be fruitless to try and copy off their neighbors. That way, students will know not to copy, and may invest more time into studying for the test and thus learn more. (More cynically, it may encourage them to find other ways to cheat, though you may find ways to deter other common methods. Honestly, even if they try and cheat by making a "cheat sheet," at least they'll accidentally study in the process).

If your main goal is 1, then yes, not telling the students in advance is certainly optimal. Be careful what you wish for, though, as failing many of your students (perhaps more than you expect) might open quite the can of worms.

Answer 5

(1) You are under no such obligation. (2a) If they know ahead of time, they will not even try. (2b) If they do not know, you will be able to directly detect copying-from-neighbours and have the offender punished.

Answer 6

Here's a late answer, based on the fact that in the time since the OP was originally posted, I started giving tests in a computer lab, via our school's LMS, and in part making use of random-block questions that randomly pull from a larger testbank. Among the advantages are that every test is a unique combination of questions, and that this structure can remain fixed between semesters: we always get unique tests without any extra effort from the instructor.

I'm broadly in favor of making these things transparent, or at least not intentionally obscured from the students. What I've done is put a written note in my syllabus testing policy, "Tests may be randomly differentiated among students." This just happens to be in the middle of one of several paragraphs; my broad assumption is that none of my students read it intelligibly in advance. I assume if students communicate it will be obvious after the first test this is happening.

To date (after 3 years) I've never gotten an inquiry or complaint about this structure, so I see only upside to having it publicly documented in the syllabus.