Individualized Excel-Based Exams to Prevent Students from Cheating

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic has brought a disruption to education, especially on how courses are delivered in higher education. Higher education providers are forced to go online, without considering the availability of IT infrastructure and capability of lecturers in delivering online courses. Since online learning is perceived as an opportunity for academic integrity breaches, academicians need to ensure that the learning processes prevent students from cheating activities, especially during the exams. This paper presents an innovative approach in delivering online, Excel-based exams which enable the lecturers to develop individualized exam questions. The accounting method and/or policy, as well as the accounting figures in the exams are automatically set based on the students’ identification numbers. This program also allows automatic scorings for such exams. Based on the students’ perceptions collected
from the online survey, this type of exam was not considered complicated and somewhat reduced the cheating opportunities. Hence, it is suggested to use these individualized Excel-based exams in the future online exams to increase the exam’s scoring objectivity and reliability scoring.