Busted!

A lot of my assignments are done through Google Forms, which has the advantage of a wide variety of ways for me to ask questions and auto-grading. I ask the kids to take a screenshot of their score at the end and upload it to Canvas, and then I use Canvas’ SpeedGrader feature to basically just copy the grades and then it syncs them with the grade book. Last year I had to go through student by student (which was still faster than it sounds) and put the grades directly into the grade book so I looked at each individual score report as I was doing it. This year (or, at least, since I started at my new school midway through November) I haven’t interacted with the actual Form all that often because they’ve uploaded the screenshots and I just work with that.

Until today, when I noted that this student had reported a score of 24/24 even though I had screwed up three of the questions. Two of them did not have right answers posted, which means it was literally impossible for any student to have gotten a grade higher than 22/24 on this assignment before I fixed it– and I just fixed it a few minutes ago. Which means my good friend here most certainly did not have the 24/24 he reports here.

I went and looked at his actual score in the Forms document. 0. He’d just gone through and put random letters in as his answers and then– skillfully, I’ll admit– edited his screenshot to show a perfect score. And I’ve zoomed in on that image and that replacement is clean. Part of me is actually proud of him. I’d have noticed this eventually of course but he’s gotten away with it at least a few times.

Tomorrow I shall flay him, and display his skin outside my classroom as a warning to future miscreants.

But not until he shows me exactly how he’s doing this.