Underlying Quiz Can Be Cheated EASILY By Students Simply NOT Answering Questions!

Hi,

I work in a college which has many classrooms where internet signal is weak, and during Kahoots, students often find themselves dropped from the game for a question or two, then drawn back in once their connection is restored.

In order to allay their fears, I tell them the Kahoot reports show me when a student is unable to answer a question, so that will not be held against them when I tally the results toward their semester grades.

I tell them ALL THE TIME that I don't track the game score, which is there for fun—I only track the correctness or incorrectness of the answers underneath the game layer. Let's say a student is dropped by a weak signal for one question, and is only able to answer nine questions out of ten, but still gets all nine correct, I grade that as a 100%.

It's not the student's fault she couldn't answer the other question, so it shouldn't be held against her.

However, I just played a game myself at home in order to test this, and it is not simply when a player CANNOT answer a question that the system drops it from the overall count—if a student simply CHOOSES NOT TO ANSWER, it is also dropped from the overall count. In my test game of ten questions, I left three unanswered on purpose. I had signal strength and was connected, but chose to let them expire without answering. Let's think of those as questions I didn't know the answer to, and I am attempting to cheat the game. I got the other seven questions correct.

After the Kahoot, I downloaded the report and went to the Final Scores tab. The score is counted as seven correct, and zero incorrect. The three I left unanswered ARE NOT COUNTED. If I were a student, I could simply tell my instructor I had a weak signal and was dropped out of the game for those three questions. My grade on the correctness of my answers would appear to be 100%.

This seems like a really important flaw in the system, and one that is easy to exploit.

I CANNOT guarantee my students will maintain internet access to the game for its entirety. People are dropping in and out of Kahoots due to weak Wi-Fi signal, or poor data connection ALL THE TIME. There is no way for me to police this.

But if the underlying correctness or incorrectness—the quiz beneath the game layer—is THIS EASY to trick, it threatens the usefulness of the whole application, at least for those of us who use it for genuine graded events in our courses.

I have put in well over a hundred hours making Kahoots at this point. I have dozens of them, and I use them on a weekly basis across numerous college courses. I would hate to find out that I can no longer make use of Kahoot for in-class graded events.

Please find a way to distinguish questions which are left unanswered due to broken internet connections (which should not be counted against a player) versus those left unanswered—and therefore incorrect—due to players simply letting the clock run out.

This is a big deal, and central to usefulness of the application.

Thanks for your consideration,

-Paul in Los Angeles

laverackpaul

March 17, 2019 17:55

This week in class, I heard one of my students openly discuss how to cheat the game by leaving some questions unanswered, so it would look as though weak internet signal had temporarily dropped him out of the game. Please figure out a solution to this.

Is anyone even reading these suggestions?

Melissasettle

March 28, 2019 08:21

I'm new to this Paul, but working on using in the same way you are (College Course). In trying to work my way through your concern and I personally don't think there's a way for the company to create that dynamic for you. (not scoring for dropped Internet versus not answering) Part of the reason is that students could still manipulate the system by simply turning off their Internet service momentarily. Unfortunately it seems that a missed question would have to be a missed question. I can't wait to see if there's a better official answer.

April 01, 2019 18:49

I appreciate your comment, and I see what you mean. This raises the question of whether or not it's fair to use Kahoot for graded events in class. If a pencil breaks, the student can sharpen it, or borrow another from a neighbor. If a smartphone signal flickers out, I can't provide that student another phone which has a stronger signal.

My classroom moves from week to week, around campus. It's just the way my school operates. I ask them to keep me out of the basement, where the cell signal is weakest, but I can't police this on a room-by-room basis, every week. Some rooms are just better than others.

If I can't count on all the students having a signal all the time, it opens the door to cheating by others who would shut off their service to avoid questions they don't know. Maybe Kahoot just doesn't work in my school setting as a graded assessment tool. That's a bummer, because I've put hundreds of hours into developing excellent Kahoots.

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