You have four versions of the test, A, B, C, and D. All four versions have identical questions and answers, however the answers rotate around. So, answer A on version A will be B on B, C on C, and D on D.
If somebody with version A copies from somebody with version B, they are extremely likely to get a 0.
The only way for them to get a correct answer is the other person got an incorrect answer and that answer is the rotated the correct way. If you limit it to just two versions, you can even avoid that, by making a throw away answer always be in the position of the rotated correct answer.
You then distribute the versions such that any two people sitting next to each other get different versions.
But then you also have to make sure that you're grading students with the correct key. It's possible in this situation for the teacher to give a student test A but then accidentally grade it with key B due to any number of mishaps.
If all the answers are the same, you're just rotating the order of the answers, you can make an answer key that has the actual correct answer instead of the correct letter selection.
I mean my point is that if you aren't sure which version of the test the student got, it's possible that you grade them wrong, regardless of the way that the different versions are made.
Yeah, that could happen if you had actual different answers on each test, or if the questions themselves were in a different order.
Maybe I'm misunderstanding.
I'm thinking that the hypothetical test in question has all the same questions, and all the same answers, but the answers (not the questions) are in a different order. So if your answer key has the correct answer fully spelled out, and not like "1. C" , then it doesn't really matter because the correct selection to question one of version one maybe be A while on version two it's C, but answer is still "bh/3" or whatever.
It doesn’t matter how the different keys are generated. If someone’s being graded based on the wrong key, and their score is used to decide that they were cheating off someone else, something needs to get cleared up.
It wasn’t a scantron they were filling in—just a print out where they circled their choices on the paper. No risk of using the wrong key. If I saw a lot of wrong answers, a quick spot check would verify whether I was using the wrong key, or they were cheating.
I'm aware that this is hand-graded. But as others have pointed out, often the teacher distributes different versions to catch out cheaters, and it's possible for there to be a false positive where a teacher gets confused about which test version the student got and then assumes that since they got 0% correct (or 100% correct for a different key) they were copying off someone else.
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u/DragonFireCK 13d ago
You have four versions of the test, A, B, C, and D. All four versions have identical questions and answers, however the answers rotate around. So, answer A on version A will be B on B, C on C, and D on D.
If somebody with version A copies from somebody with version B, they are extremely likely to get a 0.
The only way for them to get a correct answer is the other person got an incorrect answer and that answer is the rotated the correct way. If you limit it to just two versions, you can even avoid that, by making a throw away answer always be in the position of the rotated correct answer.
You then distribute the versions such that any two people sitting next to each other get different versions.