We understand that you may not always want to accept all user actions or that the student may not be aware of everything SMOWL is monitoring.
To help you quickly review and validate incidents, we have our mass validation tool, available in the results panel of your activity.
What is SMOWL CM's Mass Validation?
Our mass validation tool allows you to review the three most common types of incidents during our user monitoring. It presents web browsing, open programs, and the most-used programs by students in three tabs.
Let's look at examples of when mass validation is useful in each scenario:
Web navigation
During an exam, users typically shouldn't browse outside their activity. However, there may be times when they need or are allowed to access another tab to use information from a different website, such as analyzing an article or using an online calculator.
As mentioned earlier, we could mark web browsing as allowed. However, this would mean that it wouldn't flag other tabs or windows that the student visits, potentially facilitating academic dishonesty.
In these cases, mass validation allows us to review all web browsing considered non-permissible by the alarms configured before the exam and manually validate incidents that shouldn't be considered as such.
For example, if my students have to create a summary of the Shakespeare using information from Wikipedia, we can exclusively validate that web browsing and consider it as permissible evidence during the exam.
App interaction
One advantage of having a monitoring tool instead of a browser block is the ability to perform various types of exercises tailored to the course's needs.
However, we know that this permissiveness can tempt users to try their luck and attempt to cheat the system.
There are times when we want a user to focus on working in a specific program or document and be alerted if they engage in any other actions within the system.
Imagine our students have to download and fill out an exam in a specific Word document. We can validate the use of Word in that specific document and continue marking as incidents anything the student shouldn't use during the exam, like course notes.
Running apps
Often, users are not aware of everything running in the background on their computers. Just because certain programs are open doesn't mean they are being actively used by the user. Spotify, Teams, and other applications often open upon startup and remain in the background waiting to be used.
If we consider that a program can remain open even if the user isn't actively using it, we can always validate such running applications.
We recommend that teachers emphasise to users to disable all unnecessary software before accessing the exam. You can find the steps for Windows and Mac in this article.
As you can see, at Smowltech, we adapt to your needs, from configuration to decision-making.
We are open to any suggestions for our system, so please contact our support team through the chat, and they will address your questions.