With the high accessibility and advancement of ICT, there is likelihood of online cheating making genuine assessment not reliable. However, teachers can always attempt to minimize cheating online like explicitly including in the course guide as one ground for academic penalties, administering synchronous time-bounded assessment tests, creating rubric for assessment with quality output, time and order of submission of completed tasks as criteria. Teachers' commitment, transparency and trust on their students can help foster honesty among students. On the other hand, students' respect on their teachers can motivate learners to be sincere and responsible.

There are several ways to mitigate cheating online. The first, and probably the most obvious, is proctoring tests/quizzes. Another way is to ask content-related questions. For example, instead of using multiple choice, ask the same questions in essay form with the questions having a philosophical nature attached to the question. A timed essay test will show who knows the material and who is spending time looking up the answer. These tests are harder and more time-consuming to grade, but they provide the professor with an idea of who knows the material and who does not. Hope this helps. :)

Many thanks Holly and Frederick

Your ideas are of great help! Many thanks.

If professors are already overwhelmed, overworked is the appropriate term here, with working online, we would like technology to help with automatically scored assessment but with less cheating! I understand that most applications shuffle questions and alternatives but as you said, not everything should be tested through MCQs!

Indeed, Frederick, the instructor and the way of assessing play a great role in reducing cheating. Creating transparent and accurate rubrics and making them available for the students even before doing the assignments will help the students with self-assessment / guidance. This can create the context of trust, which is very important, together with making students work hard!