Assessment takes a much broader approach to student learning than grading does. While grading is a form of (summative) assessment, grades are limited to single course or project. Grades may say little about whether a student has been able to make connections across courses or whether individual courses have been transformed into a coherent whole. In addition, grades by themselves do not explain in detail what students have learned.

In a personalized learning classroom, it often can be hard to identify the teacher. While teachers still provide some whole classroom instruction, it is only one of a number of tools available. Teachers and administrators design innovative ways of meeting their students’ needs, mixing direct instruction with small group, one-on-one and peer-to-peer instruction, as well as incorporating self-paced and online learning, among other flexible learning environments. Consequently, it is common to see students working individually or collaboratively on challenging tasks with the teacher moving fluidly between groups and students.

Students in personalized learning classrooms engage deeply in their work and clearly understand what they are doing, what comes next and how their work connects to the real world. They have ample support and structure to develop personal responsibility for meeting learning and personal goals. They engage in authentic experiences with multiple opportunities to demonstrate their mastery of subject matter and skills through means such as projects, public presentations, performance tasks and extended writing.

When students cheat, teachers are not able to gain a clear assessment of their abilities, or how much they learned. This can cause problems for the teachers in the short term, if their performance is based on student scores, but it causes even bigger problems for students in the long run, if they are not able to demonstrate their learning.

While there’s no silver bullet to solving this problem, there are steps educators can take to mitigate it:

1. Create assessments that encourage the open use of resources. Then set more difficult questions, with the understanding that they will be searching for answers online. You students will have to do more research to find the answers they’re looking for—a process that challenges their critical thinking and leads to a richer learning experience. As a bonus, your learners will gain some useful practical knowledge in how to effectively search for information online.

2. Include subjective questions that require them to draw on personal experiences. It’s hard to cheat when you’re being asked to write from personal experience. It’s hard for learners to share answers for these types of questions, and finding a similar answer online requires enough knowledge of the subject matter to identify the correct example.

3. Have students take more frequent, lower-stress quizzes. Instead of one big exam, create smaller, micro-quizzes throughout the course that test a student’s knowledge and helps show them what they are or aren’t understanding. A 5-question review quiz isn’t significant enough for learners to try to cheat on, but is still an effective means of testing their knowledge. And a confident student who has passed review quizzes and feels they have mastered the material won’t risk cheating for a grade they think they can earn outright.