Canvas is an LMS (Learning Management System) that allows teachers to collaborate with students and provide them with learning materials that they can access from their phones or laptops.
Using Canvas, teachers can provide coursework, learning materials, and more to their students.
One of the features that Canvas offers is the ability to administer tests and quizzes over the internet. As a student, you may wonder how Canvas can tell if you’re cheating.
Can Canvas detect cheating, and how?
Are there any ways to get around the cheating detection features of Canvas?
This article will discuss all that and more.
What Are Canvas Quizzes?
Canvas quizzes are online tests administered by your teacher or professor via the Canvas Learning Management System.
Quizzes can both be graded and ungraded, with ungraded quizzes helping students practice their learning, identify knowledge gaps, and self-assess their own knowledge. Furthermore, grades can both be automatically scored or hand-scored, depending on the questions
It can be used for anything from a quick quiz to test your knowledge to full-blown exams that affect your final grade. Some teachers use the quiz feature to administer important tests, including midterm exams, final exams, and other exams.
Since the tests can be used for important purposes, and they are taken entirely online, it’s understandable that teachers have concerns about students cheating. It’s obviously easier to cheat when a student is taking an unsupervised test in the comfort of their home.
However, Canvas does have anti-cheating measures built into place. As a professor, it’s important to know which tools are available to you to prevent cheating, and as a student, it’s useful to know how Canvas can detect cheating.
What Canvas Can Detect When You’re Taking a Quiz?
Let’s first talk about what your instructor can see when you’re taking a quiz on Canvas, without installing additional software.
In a later section, we’ll talk about optional, additional measures teachers can take and add-ons they might use to detect or prevent cheating attempts.
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Professors Can See When You Leave the Tab
One of the interesting things about the Canvas exam platform is that it allows test administrators to see when test takers have left the quiz interface and navigated to a new tab.
On your professor’s end, they will see a timestamp with the remark, “Stopped viewing the Canvas quiz-taking page.” When you navigate back to the tab where you’re taking the exam, it will generate a timestamp with the title, “Resumed.”
For example, let’s say you left the tab at 4:12 to check your notes in Google Docs or to check the answers on a website that has exam answers. It took you two minutes to find the answer, and at 4:14, you navigated back to the exam page.
In that case, your professor will see that you left the tab for two minutes, as in the above screenshot.
Now, leaving the tab doesn’t automatically mean that you were cheating. Your professor might allow students to check notes during exams, and these days, many students use Google Docs, Evernote, Google Keep, Word, and other software tools to store their notes instead of using physical notebooks.
Even if your teacher doesn’t allow you to view notes, leaving your tab might not be automatic grounds for failure. For example, if you left it for less than a minute, that’s not necessarily enough time to cheat.
However, if you have a pattern of constantly leaving the tab before answering and then answering a question immediately upon returning, your teacher might suspect you of cheating, and rightfully so. You may be googling the answers or using WhatsApp Web or another messaging app to message a friend and ask them for the solutions to the questions.
Ultimately, it depends on your professor’s test-taking rules and how strict they are.
Some teachers will automatically fail you for leaving the tab, no matter how short you left it for. It might sound quite unreasonable, but there’s not much you can do about it.
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Your Teacher Can See When You View and Answer a Question
In addition, the test-taking logs show your professor when you view a question and when you answer it. That helps them detect cheating as well, although they must look for patterns of unrealistic answering behavior.
The logs show an exact timestamp of the moment you viewed a question and the moment you answered it. That, combined with leaving the tab, can help them detect cheating.
For example, if you view a question, leave the tab, and then return to answer it immediately and do this a few times during your exam, they have good grounds to believe that you cheated.
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What Teachers Can’t See Without Additional Software?
It might sound creepy that your teacher can see when you left the quiz taking page, but unless you are using additional software, that’s about all they can see.
Here are some things they can NOT see without additional software:
- What you are doing on the other tabs (your Google searches, for example)
- Which applications you navigated to when leaving the page
- What you are doing outside the computer
In other words, if you are looking at your phone while taking the exam but never navigate away from the test-taking page on your laptop, your teacher will never know. The same applies if you have two laptops, one you use for taking the exam and the other for looking up answers.
You may even invite a fellow student over and have them take the exam on their laptop beside you. You can copy answers from each other and cheat without anyone ever finding out, as long as you don’t navigate away from the page.
Your teacher can still see how long it takes to answer a question, but it can be hard to determine anything conclusive from that alone.
Your teacher may use additional software, however, to prevent such type of cheating. If you are on a video camera while taking the exam, for example, you won’t be able to look at your phone.
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Other Measures Built Into Canvas to Prevent Cheating
In this section, I will discuss exam restrictions your instructor can set during your test to prevent cheating.
Your Instructor Can Require You to Use an Access Code
Canvas has an option that allows instructors to restrict access to exams until you enter a special access code.
That helps prevent cheating, because you can’t just start your exam at any time. You must wait until your instructor provides you with the code and then enter it.
Your teacher can, for example, require you to join a Zoom meeting, so they can see what you are doing and then give you the access code to enter. That way, they can watch you as you start the exam and make sure you are not with another student.
Your Teacher Can Restrict Access to Certain IP Addresses
Furthermore, your teacher can restrict access to the exams to traffic coming from pre-approved IP addresses, such as your home IP address.
That ensures you can’t visit another student’s house and take the test together with them or go somewhere else where you can cheat. It also allows teachers to require students to take the exam in a specific computer lab.
Your Teacher Can Lock Questions
Your professor may choose to lock questions and/or only show one question at a time. Once you complete that question, it will be locked, and you will not be able to go back.
In fact, if this option is enabled, questions will be locked if you click on the Next button, even if you did not answer them.
This helps prevent cheating, as it makes cheating more time intensive and difficult. You can’t send someone a list of questions and then get all the answers at once; you’d have to send them one question at a time.
Your Teacher Can Assign a Date and Time
Your instructor can also assign a date and time, only allowing you to take the exam within that period. That way, none of the students will have taken the test already and be able to tell others what the answers to difficult questions are.
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Additional Software Your Teacher Might Use to Prevent Cheating
There are other software tools that integrate with Canvas which your professor might use to prevent or detect cheating. It’s useful to know what your teacher can see while using these software tools.
Respondus Lockdown Browser
The Respondus Lockdown Browser is more of a cheating prevention tool than a detection tool. It is a browser that more than 2,000 educational institutions use to prevent cheating.
It locks down your testing environment and ensures you can not leave your browser during the exam to check notes or google the answers. Not only that, but it maximizes the browser, so you can’t have another window open alongside it; you will be unable to minimize the browser.
It also disables your browser menu and toolbar (you can still use the back, forward, and refresh buttons). The copy and paste feature on your computer, as well as the printing and screenshot functions, will be disabled, and you will also be unable to use your computer’s right-click function or keyboard shortcuts.
In other words, the only thing you can do is take the test.
With the Respondus Lockdown Browser, your teacher doesn’t have to check whether you left the tab, because you will be unable to do so.
However, it is not foolproof, as it does not entirely prevent cheating. While it locks down your browser on your laptop, there’s nothing stopping you from using another device, such as a tablet, to get your answers.
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Copyleaks
While this article mostly focuses on cheating on exams, Copyleaks helps prevent cheating in written assignments. It is a plagiarism checker that integrates with Canvas.
Teachers can use Copyleaks to check your submissions for plagiarism. It detects not only exact-match phrases but similar phrases that use similar wording to the source.
Teachers have control over how they use Copyleaks. They can allow students to check their work themselves for plagiarism before submitting.
That gives students a chance to correct their plagiarism, and it can be helpful in cases of accidental plagiarism. However, it can also give students a chance to hide their plagiarism by changing the wording enough times until there is no identical match.
Mettl
Mettl is a virtual proctoring tool that institutions can integrate with Canvas to proctor exams.
Proctoring exams is the best way to prevent cheating, and indeed, it makes cheating quite difficult.
To start with, you’ll need to verify your identity over video with your proctor. This can be done in several steps.
For example, your instructor might require you to enter a one time passcode and verify your email, as well as present an ID card or passport that verifies your identity. That ensures nobody else is taking the test for you.
Identity verification doesn’t stop there. The software can take random images of your face during the exam, using your webcam, and use artificial intelligence to compare it to your official, authorized image.
That way, you can’t have someone else come in and continue the exam after you completed the initial identity verification.
In addition to the initial identity verification, your proctor might require you to take a 360-degree live video of your room to make sure there are no other people there and that you don’t have another laptop or notes you can cheat from.
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There are a couple of types of proctoring Mettl supports. The first is automatic proctoring, which doesn’t require human supervision, instead relying on AI.
In addition to taking periodic images and using facial recognition technology to detect an unauthorized test taker, it also uses artificial intelligence to detect irregularities in the video, such as another person in the corner of the screen.
Furthermore, it tracks the student’s audio, using their microphone, to ensure no other voices are detected.
After the test, proctors can review the video, using the flags raised by the software as points of reference. The software will generate a Credibility Index report, and teachers can investigate specific instances when red flags were raised.
Of course, the software is not foolproof. For example, if you live in an apartment building or on a busy street, and there are voices from neighbors or people outside, the AI might flag that, but your proctor can watch the recording and verify that you were not cheating.
Finally, live proctoring is possible as well, with proctors from Mettle or your educational institution. This option is usually reserved for higher-stake tests.
Your proctor can monitor you one-on-one or monitor several or even dozens of students at once.
Of course, Mettl is not the only proctoring service out there. There are many of them, and they may require you to share your screen or even lock your browser to prevent you from opening other tabs.
Proctoring is the ultimate anti-cheating software, and it makes it pretty hard to cheat.
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The Top Ways People Cheat on Canvas
Here are the top methods students use to cheat on Canvas. Note that we are not condoning cheating but simply listing these methods; if you are a professor, it’s worth knowing about these methods as well.
Looking for Answers on Another Device
This is one of the most common ways to cheat on Canvas, as long as there is no proctoring or video recording. While your teacher can see when you left the tab on your main device, they will never know if you are using your phone, tablet, or another laptop to search for answers.
If you don’t have another device, you can also use your notes to get the answers.
Having Someone Else Take the Test
Unless there is identity verification or a video of the test, your instructor won’t know if it is you taking the test or not. Even if your instructor requires you to enter an access code over video, another student can take over if the entire test is not being recorded.
Even if the test is restricted to a certain IP address, another student can come to your home to do the test, unless the IP address in question is at your school’s computer lab.
If there are no IP restrictions, you can even hire experts from the internet to take your test – there are many websites where you can find test takers for hire.
Video Conferencing With Other Students
Even if every student is restricted to taking the test on their home computer, you can video chat with them to get the right answers. Add several people to a video chat over WhatsApp, and at least one of them is likely to know the answer to any particular question.
This method works even if the teacher locks questions, only allowing you to see one question at a time.
However, one downside of this method is that the teacher can see if several people answered the question at the same time, which is a clear sign of cheating. One way to get around this is to simply coordinate so that nobody answers questions at the same time, which will make it harder for the teacher to spot a pattern of cheating.
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So, Can Canvas Detect Cheating?
Canvas, by itself, only allows professors to see when students left a tab and when they viewed and answered questions. That can help them suspect cheating, but it can be hard to prove that without a doubt.
Some professors may fail you for leaving the tab, but there are many other ways to cheat, such as by using another device to find solutions to exam questions.
However, Canvas has additional anti-cheating measures built into place, and your school or teacher may also use a proctoring software or lockdown browser to stop you from cheating.
