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ABSTRACT
As educational systems move from onsite to online due to the COVID-19 pandemic, teachers face the difficulty of designing online examination formats which minimize opportunities for dishonesty. In this paper, we expose our design of such a format: a protected Microsoft Excel spreadsheet containing short-answer questions, which was implemented in a calculus module taught by us. This format allows examiners to randomize questions with the aim that each student receives each question with different numerical details, making plagiarism impossible, while keeping the marking effort very low.
2020 MATHEMATICS SUBJECT CLASSIFICATION:
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Notes
1 This survey was given to 635 students of an Appalachian university, as reported by Watson and Sottile (Citation2010).
2 This duration applies to all of our examinations, including the fourth one.
3 In a normal, non-pandemic situation, this may be suboptimal (cf. Section 6 and Braswell and Kupin (Citation1993), Wolf (Citation1995)).
4 There is not any particular reason for the use of this specific version.
5 We took all mathematical symbols from the Symbol menu, thereby making no use of the Equation menu, which inserts mathematical symbols in the form of moveable objects.
6 Depending on the students' level of experience and adaptability, it may also be necessary to train them with questions posed in such a format over the semester.
7 Obviously, this is not a weakness if this format is used for a course on a computer algebra system.