Inspera and assessment security
Inspera has several features that can be used in concert to promote academic integrity and assessment security.
Assessment design
- The multimedia features of Inspera allow rich assessment tasks to be created with images, videos, audio tracks and other stimulus materials. This makes it easier to design and build more authentic, contextual assessment tasks which are less 'Googleable', therefore reducing opportunities to cheat.
- The number of different question types which can be combined in numerous and varied ways allows the construction of quite complex questions that can still be automatically marked. Students do limited typing with these questions, so do not have the option to copy and paste (e.g., they cannot copy from Google Translate in language courses) therefore reducing opportunities to cheat.
- The incredible variety of what can be created in Inspera allows us to completely re-conceptualise what an exam can be, meaning you can achieve identity-verified assessment through exams and in-class tasks without sacrificing authentic kinds of tasks.
- For non-exam assessment, you can build a referencing 'page' into the assessment modules that models or links out to information explaining the importance of correctly acknowledging sources, and how to do this.
- With rubrics, you can make "correct acknowledgement of sources" a criterion in the assessment for which students receive marks.
- Students say they are least likely to cheat in vivas, personalised and unique tasks, reflections on practicums, and in-class tasks (Bretag et al., 2019). These assessment types can all be done in Inspera.
Cheating reduction
- Several features make it possible to provide different versions of the same assessment to students, including randomised order of questions, randomised selection of questions, students can self-select different questions, and multiple versions of the same question are easily created.
The incidents of academic misconduct through file-sharing sites dried up as in Inspera you can restrict students from downloading or printing their completed and marked worksheets. (ERTH1000, Inspera Pedagogical Evaluation Report, 2023)
Cheating detection
Question allocation in marking – it is easier for markers to detect if students have colluded because they are marking the responses of every student for that question.
Exam Security
- Safe Exam Browser is the current lockdown browser used for digital BYOL on-campus exams. It provides a secure, identity verified environment for in-person exams.
Additional components
The Inspera assessment platform has 2 additional components to ensure that UQ can:
- cater for external students
- meet requirements of accrediting bodies for a certain percentage of assessment to be invigilated
- manage risks around academic excellence and reputable degrees through enhancing assessment integrity.
Inspera Integrity Browser
The Inspera Integrity Browser is an advanced lockdown browser that creates a secure environment by 'holding' students in Inspera Assessment.
It disables screen capturing capabilities such as screenshots, screen recordings, and the saving or copying of exam content. It also disables the print function so assessment content cannot easily be shared. The browser settings are configured on each assessment, and can be set to strict, moderate, or open settings.
Integrity Browser can be used for any timed assessment, including online recorded oral assessment.
Inspera Resilience
A configurable remote invigilation solution which provides monitoring of students via webcam, and screen and audio sharing technology. Inspera Resilience must be used in conjunction with Inspera Assessment and Inspera Integrity Browser.
The configurable options currently include:
- record and review later.
Future configurable options will include:
- recording with live intervention in the event of a flag invigilation
- live invigilation with recording
- live invigilation without recording.