IIT Kharagpur’s point of view regarding best practices to avoid malpractices in online examination
Experience says that generally the rules are required to be framed for a purpose for possibly 5% of people who are not so disciplined and cause disturbance to the whole system. For this 5% of people, 95% of people do suffer as they need to go through a constricted process.
Setting stringent measures for curbing malpractices in an examination is no exception. Possibly a handful of students resort to some kind of unethical practices for which a host of norms are required to be framed for which a large number of students feel suffocated.
Students of the IIT system are admitted through a very competitive process and there is no reason to assume that our students will be adopting malpractices of mass cheating in an examination. Though our experience demonstrates that we had a few cases at least in the past of malpractices, percentage-wise this is absolutely minimal. For such instances, immediate actions such as deregistration, cancellation of paper etc. were imposed. Nevertheless, we have adopted several measures to curb malpractices through several innovative ways:
(i) Use of technology – use of Moodle, a double shuffle examination software
(ii) Through VIVA-VOCE to have one to one interaction
(iii) Setting of tests to have time crunch (set for one hour and allowed half an hour)
(iv) Combination of written and oral tests
(v) Setting innovative questions wherein answers for each student differs
(v) Consider each examination as an open book examination
We wish to inculcate amongst our students the same responsibility and try to imbibe amongst them that the acts such as malpractices in examination bring bad names not only for themselves but for the Department / Centre / Units they come from and for the Institute and their family as well. Such kind of activity is going to cause a ripple at the national level. Hence students should refrain from these.
