Academic Integrity in Online Testing: How Three Institutions Define Success

My name is Ari Sowers. I am a director of our training and success program here at Respondus. We're hosting this panel discussion today with our three wonderful panelists from some client institutions, both Canvas users and Respondist application users. This is John Lowe from Baylor University. This is Amanda Rosenweig from Delgado to college. And Jeff Chestnut from Northern Kentucky University.

So really happy to have you all here. Thank you all for joining in this crowded room. We're excited to have a full house. What I'm gonna do first before I have our panel to speak is just give you a bit of background about Respondus in case anyone isn't familiar with our applications and what they do because it'll give you a little more context around what some of the panelists are gonna talk about today. We're gonna be here till two o'clock.

If make sure, I guess the housekeeping this was that you got scanned at the door both by instructure and by someone from Respondus because we are doing a drawing later for a Surface Pro. So if you didn't get scammed by a Respondus person, see one of them in the back before you leave. Alright. So just to jump into the Respondus bit of things. What we do so, like I said, I'm gonna do the background first.

And then we'll get into our panel discussion on online testing and remote proctoring and we'll try to leave enough time for So what we do is we provide several different solutions that work with campus quizzes to help you all and your faculty and instructors protect the integrity of your online assessments. So lockdown browser is a custom browser that prevents digital cheating during Canvas quizzes. Respondus monitor is a fully automated proctoring solution for remote exams and instructor live proctoring is a feature that comes with respondus monitor that allows instructors to use lockdown browser and a video conferencing system so they can observe students remotely. All of our applications seamlessly integrate with Canvas. And yes, we support both new quizzes and the classic quizzes.

Yay. And they support a wide range devices. So not just Windows and Mac, but Chromebook and iPad, like devices your students use. And our solutions, in all, are used by more than fifteen colleges, universities, and hundreds of millions of exams each year, and that's all over the world. And we support many different kinds of testing scenarios, and you're gonna hear about some of those today.

In classroom testing with an instructor or a proctor, remote testing where examinees might be, you know, not physically in the same room or been doing work at a long distance, like at home or work or a library. High Flex, which is the term we use, but some of you will probably do too, for classes some students are physically in the classroom and others are remote and even testing centers on campus, computer labs, places like that where students are taking tests, in a on campus facility. Alright. So that's what we do. So now I'm gonna turn things over to our panelists to let them enter reduce themselves a little bit.

If you don't all mind sharing your role, and then a little bit about the state of online testing at your campus. And your institution's use of integrity applications, not just ours. It's okay. I'm actually gonna have Amanda go first. Hi, everybody.

I'm gonna Roesensweig. I'm at Delgado Community College in New Orleans, Louisiana, and I have multiple roles in my college. Am the Canvas administrator, but I'm also a biology professor. So I'm a user as well as the admin of the product. So I get to see it from both sides.

And I get to work directly with students and hear their concerns or their questions directly. And our college uses multiple different proctoring services, but we've been with Respondus the longest, and it's probably the most heavily used one. And we have been piloting alternative proctoring services for the past year for, different solutions that we might needs such as, certification exams, but we always seem to come back to Respondus for, I would say, everything from price point to support. Who's next? Man, I'm gonna have you expand a little bit further. You mentioned price point.

One of the things I'll point out is you You all have had an unlimited license of respond as monitor, which means there's no like worrying about fees and things like that for a couple of years now. We did the math for Amanda. So last this current year, the price per exam is just under twenty two cents. So, yeah, we chose that model when COVID hit, as everyone did, we were scrambling, we were freaking out. And a lot of our students that chose not to be online were forced to go online.

And one of the major issues was proctoring, and we didn't want to put a burden on our students to have to pay for an extra fee. And for those that are in the south right after COVID, we got hit by Hurricane Ida, which was devastating, so we were out of school for almost a month. And those were just more issues that our students had to face. So by partnering with Respondus, getting this unlimited deal that we have with them, we were making that onus off of our student's plate. Twenty two cents first through it, for example, for our exam? For exam.

Yeah. And then we also did some more math with Amanda to, talk about how Respondus monitor is used by their subject matter or depart no matter you mind expanding on that? Yes. So I'm very proud to say that I am in the STEM disciplines, but math is not my strong suit, but a lot of our disciplines will require a percentage of their test be proctor. Are for academic integrity. And it's usually it's gonna differ by department and discipline.

But as you can see, the health professional and the stem disciplines pretty much require every test to be proctored regardless if they're open notes or if they're a high stakes exam, and that's just also for the integrity of the questions so they don't get out into the world as easily as they can. And then, all of our other disciplines do dabble in it, but usually they only require a midterm and a final, or just a final exam, and not every exam for it. But it is used throughout the entire college, all disciplines in conjunction with alternate proctoring products depending on their needs. Again, certifications is one biggest needs for live proctoring by someone other than the teacher. Alright.

Thank you Amanda. I'm gonna turn things over to John from Baylor to talk a little bit about what you do and and Baylor yourself. Yeah. Great. So my name is John Lowe.

I'm at Baylor University. I'm the associate director of systems. So my team is the team that's responsible for the learning management system. Our, Procter and Solutions, turn it in, you know, zoom, all all the things that are used in teaching and learning. That's kind of what my group does.

So we're a small team of four people. So we're we're kinda spread a little bit thin in that. Baylor is a, r one Christian University. Is about twenty one thousand students currently. So we use Procterine, fairly heavily.

Baylor for the longest time was a in person only campus, but has spun up a lot of online programs in the last ten years or so. We have a lot of graduate professional education programs, hold degree programs. A lot of those use, Procter and Solutions mainly respondus, primarily, our OMBA program, uses it very heavily, as does, some of our other department Cross campus. It is available to all of our colleges and schools, across the university. So everyone can use, Respondus if they would like to.

We do have also the unlimited license. It is one of those things that we don't necessarily push, but we do, you know, encourage that anybody who wants to, is welcome to use it, and many, many people do. Particularly after the pandemic. A lot of our faculty discovered that they no longer have to spend class time doing examination They can take advantage of a tool like Respondus and Respondus monitor in order to, keep the instruction time, instructional time, and the testing kind of outside of the classroom. So that's it's often many, many cases of how it's used at Cape campus for us.

And I didn't mean to put so much math on everybody, but we did more math here too, the way that John came out. So this little chart we up here and John kind of explained a little bit of this already shows the exam sessions that used Respondus monitor over the past couple of years. So if you wanna talk about that. Yeah. I Yeah.

The twenty twenty. There it is. You you see it in a bar graph. But, yes, exactly right. And, it's been something that's available there.

And we did switch to the unlimited, license, at that same time. We've we've used response like browser for ages well before Canvas even existed. We were Blackboard, customers. So I think they're two thousand one, that predates me at Baylor and I there twenty something years already. So, yeah, long time, but, yeah, great great information.

Great. Alright. So let's pass things over to Jeff. Hi. I'm Jeff Chestnut.

I'm from Northern Connecticut University, and I in the director of our center for innovation and technology and education, which I manage the LMS, and a team of instruction with liners. And we manage also all of the add on products to Canvas. So, We have been a Respondist customer for a long time, I think, back to our Blackboard days, and we've been on Canvas seven years now. And, I like to think it was good foresight on my part working with Steven that we went unlimited the summer before COVID hit. So we were set up and I, are you she didn't have to have extra caution or panic mode when when when COVID set in.

We also went unlimited on our video, product too. Right before the the pandemic. So we were set up good in a couple couple areas there. We use, Respondus lockdown, some of our faculty won't teach an online course without it. Others, use it for different purposes.

But, one of the things that we decided we had questions about it, you know, wanting to go to a live proctor solution. And for us, we're a tuition driven institution, and it's not physically responsible for us put that cost onto our students. It would get us out of the competitive market for our, for recruiting our students. So Respondus' is the tool that we we put out there. And we try to work with professors if they need something more, work with them on a case by case basis to see know why they're doing that.

There's a point there at the bottom that kind of harkens back to something Amanda said, which is we did some more math. And at Northern Kentucky, it's about an average of six exam sessions per course. So, you know, Mandy, we're saying, you know, some of your courses might only use for midterm and final where some others might use it for every weekly quiz and the midterm and final. So it's it's nice to see you making a lot of use of it. Jeff, I'm gonna stay with you, and we're gonna move on to the first question I'll pause all of you.

So thank you for all that background. The question is what policies does your institution have for ensuring exam integrity. Well, it's been probably, two years ago now that our University was looking at, they were they were saying too many students are not being honest on their exams. So we the provost instituted a university wide committee academic honesty or it was academic dishonesty, I think. I was like, we don't like that term.

So we called it we changed the name to academic integrity, but it has members from every college in the university, plus IT and and my office we started looking at what can we do to to fight this, and we found out that There wasn't really a good definition of what academic honesty, academic integrity was. And the students' idea here and the faculty's idea was over here. So we actually defined those and created the the committee decided, and we put up some webpages to really educate both faculty and students, to those policies. And we've created our academic integrity web pages that define some of those, those terms, and we did some research to find out that, there were some things that our faculty could do to prevent students from that need to think I have to cheat in order to pass this class. What can they do to alleviate that? And that's the real focus that this academic integrity many is taken.

We've done research with the students, and, we're working with faculty members We created a checklist of things that that our instructional designers can go through with faculty members to say, okay, here are some things that you can look at in course to lessen the need that the students would have to cheat. And Jeff, you shared with me the discussion about some, communication between instructors about these suspected violations. In with the with the some of the the things that came out of this committee, were the instructor one of the big things was if they explain to their students why they're using a product like Respondus lockdown browser and monitor. And one of our biggest users are our nursing faculty, and just telling them that It's not that we think you're all cheating, and even though some faculty probably did think that, but they really conveyed the message to them, but in order to get certified and pass your your boards at the end of the program, you're going to have to take a test that uses a product either respondus monitor or a product just like it in order to to get certified. That alleviated some, a lot of the complaints from the students.

Of course, the the real cheaters were still complaining, but the other students that just feeling like they didn't they weren't trusted. It alleviated that. I have to switch myself on and off so you're not listening to me breathing here. John, can I put that same question? Do you know, pass the take around. Sure.

Yes. So Baylor has, had an honor code for years. It's one of those that, just kinda goes through revisions over time. We don't have anything very specific to proctoring or, you know, mandating that anybody uses a proctoring solution or anything specific. But we do also have an office of academic integrity.

So it's a formalized office at our school. They kind of chair the honor council that is made a faculty representative. So if there are issues that come up or complaints, then that goes before the honor council. They review it. They have basically have a hearing with the students.

But it's basically our standardized, kind of honor code, that Baylor sort of had for, I mean, decades. Definitely predates me, there. But it's just kind of one of those things that kind of evolves over Now we do have, you know, a statement that we encourage everybody to put into their syllabus, you know, referencing the honor code. So we, you know, make sure that faculty are, you know, communicating with your students, you know, the expectations, that are associated with, academic integrity that way. But otherwise, we don't have any necessarily formal policies, specific lead to, proctoring.

And you mentioned at one point, you you do sometimes wind up talking to faculty who might be using a proctoring and advising them on how to use it in those situations. Well, that is just kind of our role in our tech group. Because that's the thing. A lot of times, the the the faculty try to use this as kind of like, you know, hard evidence of, you know, something going on. But what they don't understand is a lot of times any of these sort of proctoring solutions, things come up.

You know, there's going to be exam interruptions, particularly as more and more people submit their exams at home. You know, you're gonna have a a younger sibling walk through the room. You're gonna have, you know, somebody start a cleaner, not realizing they're taking a test. I mean, all sorts of weird stuff happens, and that's just as part of it. So trying to convey to our faculty that they under stand to to look at what the flags actually are, you know, to go through and actually sort of, you know, use common sense, you know, just because there's a flag doesn't necessarily mean that it's anything.

You know, you get a percentage at the end, but, you know, that doesn't necessarily mean that there's, you know, something specifically wrong there, to use common sense associated with it. So that's kind of our biggest message back to our faculty whenever they're you know, out trying to get a student, you know, for something. Thanks for that. Now, Amanda, I'm gonna turn things Manda wins the the prize at our panel for having the most titles. So I think she said she teaches in addition to supporting our application.

So -- Yeah. -- Mandel on your perspective here. So multiple things I wanna say. I grieved everything they just said. We do have an academic integrity statement every syllabus that's required by our college.

We do have a student judicial board that is manned by I never remember this man's title, but he has a long title also. And then we can file, reports if we have evidence of testing violations. We never accuse anyone of cheating, but coming back to student not being, honest when they take assessments. It's a deterrent when there's a will, there's a way. They can find a way around it.

They're very smart. They say they don't know how to use technology. They use it better than most of us. But, one thing that we have found that's really helped with academic integrity is speaking to the students about why we are using these products, having our statement as a question on the exam, not anything they answer just as, you know, here's some information. They scroll right past it, but it's still there.

And something that's very important is training faculty, having one on I'm not gonna say one on one. We have way too many faculty about, but having conversations with them on how to read the flags, how to review exams, I tell my faculty, I don't expect you to watch five hundred students forty five minute exams seven times a semester. You look at thumbnails. You look at flags. You look at percentages.

You look at grades. Did they go from not doing well? All of a sudden, to making hundreds. There's a lot of key moments that you can look at. And then because I'm Canvas ad and a teacher and I'm the department chair for biology. I get them all coming to me, so I'm very aware of the diverse, incidents that occurred on our campus.

A lot of times, the students aren't even aware that their internet bandwidth has gone very low and that they're getting no video signal. They don't get a warning sometimes, and they're still taking the test. There has to be compassion and empathy in this process also. And that's where AI can never take over that human touch, but this all comes with training of faculty. And even though sometimes we expected the worst and we assume the worst, you know, our students are doing the best they can most of the time.

And I teach at a first generation college know, nontraditional student. So we have a different group of students coming through that we have to make sure that we are supporting their needs and where they are instead of where we want them to be at the moment. Thank you for that. So I'm gonna pose a new question, and actually throw in some of my own perspective too just as a moderator here. The next question is, how do you define success? Work part of my title is customer success.

So obviously I have some thoughts on this, and these things might be different. You know, when I talk to our other, clients which that we work with and and the other members of my team. We always ask this question, you know, what does success look like to you? And might be, you know, if you're a new institution, it might be like getting something off the ground easily with integration that's easy or technical support that doesn't require a lot of effort or they have little to do oftentimes with product features. They have more to do with things like ease of use and like Amanda was talking about training. Sometimes institutional requirements that have to do with accessibility or fairness, in, you know, ensuring that software isn't biased in some way or data privacy.

So I'm gonna turn things back to the panel. And John, if you don't mind, I'll I'll pick on you first. What does success look like for you with something like a proctoring Yeah. Exactly. So with for Procter solution for us, success is something that's easy enough for the faculty to be able to use it and to understand what the reports mean and all those flags.

So, you know, we've tried multiple solutions, at Baylor. We've we've had respondents, obviously, We've tried several other different vendors. Some may or may not be here also today. But there's but it's one of those things that we just like check that is actually easy enough to use. And truthfully, Respondus enabling that inside a Canvas quiz is one of the easiest processes that any instructor can do.

We don't do a lot of training on our campus. We have one person on our team that actually does training We send a lot of people to Ari, to do a lot of our training. We refer to her videos. We post those sort of things up there, but it's an easy enough solution that they can go there, they could set the options that they want. If they want to enable students to take it on a Chromebook or an iPad or, you know, whatever those other little special options are.

Know, that's easy enough for them to do. They don't actually need us hand holding them to set up the product. They don't need us hand holding to evaluate the product. You know, the result at the end. I mean, they they see the reports.

They see the flags. They can click on a flag, and it jumps right to that point in the video. I mean, when we first rolled out Respondus Montair, a lot of faculty were just concerned. It's like, I don't wanna watch all of my students take an hour long test every, you know, no. You don't have to do that.

Just look at the flags. Look at the little thumbnails. I mean, back then, it was just thumbnails even that you could see, that was easy. But now with the flags, it's, I mean, it's super easy. I mean, literally, here's a flag, click on it, see what's happening, and then use your judgment when you're kinda making those decisions.

So ease of use is definitely a big big big factor for us, for our support load mainly. Well, I would say this success is defined by student and teacher satisfaction. And so we do gather that data in surveys. We do look at the needs and the wants, and we have been very successful in supporting the students' faculty with our products. A lot of training.

I go back to training because as John was saying, you look at the flags I also inform faculty and students that we catch most of our testing violations in the environment video. They forget that it's cording from the moment that environment video occurs through the rest of the testing procedure. But, because our school is large, but we only have four people in our Canvas admin department, Most of the training, most of the troubleshooting does come to me. We encourage them to go to Respondus technical support that usually doesn't happen. But instead of having a student frustrated, it takes one bad comment to, you know, ruin any idea or any experience with product and it takes five hundred to make it acceptable again.

This summer, when we started doing some more pilots, the students were outraged that they were using Respondus. So that to me says a lot. So, you know, just piloting new products, saying we wanna make sure the students have the best experience. That feedback right there told me that maybe we were going in the wrong direction now. Maybe we need to pull back and reevaluate everything.

And I think at at NKU, our success is giving something to the faculty that that gives them assurance that the test is gonna be in a fair environment. And we're doing our due diligence to try to prevent students from being dishonest. And and the students, you know, some of those we found out in some of our student surveys is they were worried about other students that they it wasn't a fair they weren't being judged fairly against the other students because they felt that in this them that sense of, you know, that it is gonna prevent the dishonest students from cheating. I will say that students will tattle tell on other students faster than you can imagine because They are upset that all their hard work that they've done is not being represented when another individual is given the same foundation and then they find a way around it. They turn each other in so quickly.

That's where we find out a lot of our information. And then they're not that bright about posting on social media. So then we track them there too. But again, a lot of it is talking to them. I feel that when students do have academic dishonesty or testing violations.

It's because out of desperate need for the moment, not because they're not capable. And they have to see that there is care out there because again, I'm serving a population of students. Thank you all for that. Shifting gears a little bit. We talked a lot about students.

I wanna ask you all about faculty and instructors. How do you encourage faculty adoption of a new tool, a proctoring solution whoever wants to go first. Usually ours is driven by the faculty. They were they're requesting it and they're knocking on my door and Jeff can we at this, you know, what can we do about this? Looking for a solution, and I think there's when I support faculty and working with them, there is a little bit of a learning curve. And, and I think the more there's a a faculty member uses Respondus lockdown.

I had a faculty member come to me and she was like, tell me what happening in this video. She was watching a video of a student taking a test, and the student was going. I'm like, I think she's looking at her no or whatever's to the right of her computer. And I'm like, did you say in your description for the test that it was no notes? And she's like, no. I'm like, so we learned as we go along, the more they use it, They need to to figure those things out.

And I think the big thing is getting the faculty members to use the practice test at the beginning of the semester. You've got if you're gonna watch any of the videos, you gotta watch that one. And then have a a meeting with the students, say Johnny, you gotta get more lights in your room so that your video shows up. You know, those kind of things is a learning for both the students and the faculty members. And that's gonna really make a big difference in the success that they're going to have using a lockdown browser.

So our faculty, all of them have different needs depending on their department and depending on products they use. And I will say that we've been with Respondus fifteen years somewhere around there. And as our faculty needs have changed, Respondus has answered those needs. Changed with us, and they've changed with the, you know, academic environment. There's a lot of, integrations now with publisher materials, which was a pain point for faculty that if they're using a publisher platform that Respondus wasn't able to access it, but they are, you know, answering those questions.

So faculty adoption is easy when their needs needs are being met. And when their needs aren't being met, that's why we open the door to, alternative solution and that's why what's great is every time we have a pain point and I bring it up. Oh, look, we just have this now that's available. I So send it out to faculty. It makes about eighty to ninety percent in a much happier.

So it's growing with the product. Having faith, having that relationship in the product. You know, we choose this product in the beginning for a reason. And if they're not meeting our needs, then we have to discuss that, but as long as they keep growing with our needs, then it's easy to have faculty buy in. But faculty need to be heard so that has to happen at some point in your such as road map? And I'm just gonna echo what they say.

I mean, we're we're also not pushing the products. So it's almost always driven by the faculty request, you know, what do we have that can do this or that or whatever else? The Proctoring is the same sort of solution. You know, when we're asked, you know, Hey, do we have some sort of proctoring solution? We tell them about Respondus. We make sure that they know about it. Also, we may also make sure they know where to get the support they need.

Like I say, we don't do a lot of in house support for Respondus. We don't need to We rely on the support and the training and all the videos and documentation and all the even live sessions that started mainly during the pandemic and just were, like, constant. I mean, we put their training sessions on our training calendar that all the faculty look at So they would go out and talk to Ari and learn how to use Respondus, because they make that sort of stuff available for them. So for our side, you know, the adoption is really easy. It was just kinda like, yeah, here's where you go.

Have fun. Great. So maybe that leads into, the last I have for all of you and then just in the interest of time is that what's the number one piece of advice you would give to other institutions who are either looking to adopt or evaluate a proctor solution? I would just say, look at what your needs are. For for our situation at Baylor, Respondus, lockdown browser and monitor handles about ninety nine percent of all of our Procter needs. There's very few things that a and it's doctor wants to do that it were related to a test, at least in Canvas, that this would not be able to one eight.

You know, we've tried other things. We've looked at other solutions, and we do have another school that is using another Procter solution because they've got a very specific use case where they need to run external software outside the Canvas quiz, while they're doing the Canvas quiz, things like that just gets a little complicated. Respondus is getting better in that. In fact, that they now offer screen recording, you know, as a new option, that's really cool. You know, so eventually, it's possible that this will even be able to take care of that need entirely.

So look at what your needs are, and then find a solution that actually can meet those. And for us, you know, it's it's been on this. I echoed the needs, and I am a big, promoter of faculty and student training, we often forget about the side of student support. Anytime you go to a new product, you have to have an action plan on you're gonna deliver and roll it out because if students don't feel supported, they get frustrated. And that's why I do some one on ones and ninety nine percent of the errors they're getting are student user errors, but they don't know that.

And they don't care. They don't care that is their fault. They just wanna accomplish the end, which is taking the exam. So having that plan for training of faculty and students regardless if it's through internally or externally, you have to have that plan? I would say as part of your training program with faculty, I would highly recommend that you create a course in Canvas that's Respondus one hundred and one and give them a test using Respondus lockdown browser. And then they not only they see how how it uses from a student perspective, but also it makes them think a little bit more Is every one of my weekly quizzes, does it need respond as lockdown browser and monitor? For a ten point quiz, is that necessary? Because I think that's a big part of your success with students is that they see, okay, this is a high stakes exam.

We're gonna we have to use respondus lockdown browser on it. My weekly quiz to make sure I'm reading the text doesn't require that. And that's, I think until faculty, some of them until they really experience it for themselves. Oh, that's what I'm making my students do to use this product. And it and it makes them yes. That's exactly what I want to happen, or maybe my weekly clears as I can I cannot use that and only use it on my exams? And I think that makes it a better experience the students, you know, because you're accomplishing that high stakes when they're more more susceptible to be dishonest and you're preventing that.