How to Catch Cheating with Clickers? Here’s an Idea

I received an email today from a colleague asking me if I knew of any “clever, low-hassle” methods for catching a student cheating with clickers. In a large class (say, 100-300 students), one student might bring his friend’s clicker to class and respond to your clicker questions using both clickers, making it appear as if the absent student is present. This is an issue if you use clickers to take attendance. It’s a bigger issue if you use clickers for graded quizzes.

My colleague was asking the question in the context of a team-based learning (TBL) course in which students take quizzes first on their own, then in teams. Their individual and team quiz grades are averaged (using some weighting) to contribute a good portion of their overall course grade. In this context, clicker cheaters are a big problem.

Here’s what I wrote to my colleague. I invite your thoughts and “clever, low-hassle” ideas on catching clicker cheaters in the comments below!

Some clicker systems have a “pick a random student” feature that selects one student at random from those that just voted on a question. If your system has this feature, then you can use it every now and then to “cold call” a student. (“Okay, the system has picked Jason Smith. Jason, what was your answer to this question and why did you select it?”) If the system picks a student who isn’t in the room, then you’ve caught a cheater. And the threat alone of being caught this way might do the trick.

This method assumes that Jason’s friend Nick doesn’t answer your cold call, pretending to be Jason. However, that’s a much more egregious instance of cheating than simply bringing Jason’s clicker to class and voting for him.

Of course, if your clicker system doesn’t have the “pick a random student” feature, then you’ll have to take another approach. I usually answer this question by saying that this is a classroom management issue, not a technological issue. When you’re not able to spot clicker cheaters yourself, you might enlist TAs to sit around the room and spot them. You can also make clear to students that this kind of cheating isn’t allowed. A warning might reduce this kind of cheating, but probably won’t eliminate it. Some schools have included statements about clicker cheating in their honor codes, which helps, since that usually means the punishment for getting caught is greater, which deters cheating.

I often recommend that instructors worried about cheating use low-stakes clicker questions so that even if some cheating happens, it won’t give students a significant advantage. Grading on effort, not accuracy of answers, is one way to do this, as is making the clicker quiz grades a relatively small component of students’ overall class grades.

In a TBL context, however, the individual student quizzes are relatively high stakes, right? One of the components of TBL is that students earn some of their points on individual quizzes and some on team quizzes. If the individual quizzes don’t count for much, the pedagogy doesn’t work the same.

Here’s an idea that might work. What if you asked the following clicker question: “What’s the last digit of your social security number?” Assuming you have a record of each student’s social security number, you could check the clicker responses to your records. If Nick brought Jason’s clicker to class and if Nick doesn’t know Jason’s social security number (a safe assumption), then there’s a 90% chance he’ll answer this question incorrectly. That will flag Jason as a cheater. It won’t flag Nick as a cheater, but perhaps you can get Jason to turn on his conspirator. That works on Law & Order all the time.

What do you think? Might this work? And if social security numbers wouldn’t work in your context, perhaps there’s some other student ID number you could use.

So, readers, what do you think of this idea? Do you have other ideas for catching clicker cheaters?

6 Responses to "How to Catch Cheating with Clickers? Here’s an Idea"

Bill Goffe says:

February 12, 2010 at 2:12 pm

Here’s what I do (this idea comes from Dirk Mateer of Penn State). Every few classes, well into the class, call a set of randomly selected names from students in the class and have them show their IDs (say to your TA). If they had clicker responses that day but nobody came up, give them a zero clicker grade for the course. Of course, the latter point has to be on the syllabus.

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derekbruff says:

February 12, 2010 at 5:47 pm

Thanks for the idea, Bill. I liked this story from Chris Ellis over on the Team-Based-Learning listserv, too:

I once caught a class of 72 people doing exactly this!
I stopped, counted the people in the class and found that there were four more answers than there were noses in the class. I reacted someone sternly threatening them with academic misconduct if they continued the practice even though I had no idea who was actually doing the cheating.

But the perpetrators weren’t too bright because they stopped answering for their buddies right then and there on question #11. So, for four people, they had answers 1-11 and then nothing from 12 on. I chuckled when I saw how easy it was to catch them.

They were called in to my office and dealt with appropriately.

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Jennifer says:

February 13, 2010 at 5:04 pm

One caveat about the ‘pick-a-student’ feature – some systems (at least I know this is true of eInstruction) pick ANY student on the roster, not just those who are in class with joined clickers. I’ve gotten around that by bringing a hard copy of the roster and picking a student off of that (based on which clicker IDs indicate a response was submitted). I think that a VERY strong threat can also work – before I knew that the system didn’t restrict itself to students in the classroom, I had a situation where the student did not respond and I told the class, “The system says John is here; since he’s not answering, I have to assume someone else has his clicker. Whoever that is, please tell John he just got an F in the class.” My understanding is that this has been passed along to other students because two semesters later, I still have students ask me if I really will fail someone for giving their clicker to a friend.

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Laurel Travis says:

October 13, 2017 at 1:37 pm

At some random time in the term, follow the quiz with a surprise extra question: “what row are you in?” Walk down the aisle making it very clear what row is what, and that all students need to answer because you are looking for “Phantom” students. Be sure to close the question before counting the number of students in each row. If the number is off in any row, have that row sign in. You can catch both those students who answered the first question but not the second, and those who answered the second in a way that didn’t correspond to a physical student. I then offer a lower penalty to those “phantom” students who also come forward with their partner.

Just wrote up five cases. I expect to get a reputation for this very quickly, which should shut this nonsense down almost entirely.

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Johannes says:

November 4, 2017 at 1:25 pm

How about announcing “double attendance points” or the like that requires each student sign a sheet of paper with their name and student ID. This masks the other motive, to match the sign-in sheet with the clicker responses. This allows you to identify the phantom student, but not the enabling student.

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Stephanie Raffaele says:

February 25, 2018 at 3:41 pm

What a clever idea! The punishment sounds fair, and I don’t think names need to be revealed.
I’m pleased that no cheaters were found in your class. Do you include a statement in your syllabus about clicker cheating?

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