How to stop cheating in a quiz on students’ phones

Where phone quizzes leak

• Switching to another app, a search tab or a chat to look up answers.
• Opening an AI assistant built into the browser, which can read the page.
• Copying the question out, or screenshots shared in a group chat.
• Someone outside the room taking the quiz for a classmate.
• Neighbours comparing the same paper in the same order.

What works

One strike: leaving submits the test

Warnings are easy to ignore. A stricter rule is that switching app or tab, opening an app side by side, copying, pasting or pressing a screenshot key submits the attempt at once, and only the professor can let the student back in. Students should see these rules and agree before they start.

Start in the room

Requiring the attempt to start on the classroom’s network, and ending it if the network changes, stops a friend at home from sitting the quiz.

A different paper for each student

Shuffle question order and option order per student, and draw from a larger pool where you can. Comparing answers with a neighbour stops being useful.

Questions an AI cannot read

Browser AI assistants read the text of the page. Drawing the question as an image means there is no question text for them to read.

Signals on written answers

For written answers, pasted text and unusual typing patterns are useful signals. Treat them as flags to look at, not proof.

Enforce it on the server

Anything that lives only in the browser can be undone by a reload. Locks and attempts should be recorded on the server.

How Sessional does it

Sessional’s lockdown tests do all of the above: one strike, classroom Wi-Fi only, per-student shuffling, questions drawn as images, writing signals and live flags on the professor’s dashboard. The server keeps every lock, and only the professor can unlock a student.

Questions people ask

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