Part way through 1st online exam. Cheating is blatantly obvious, as I feared. (Ppl finishing at same time, w/ exact answer patterns.) Have 5 more exams scheduled. Considering dropping them or acknowledging they're going to cheat & switching to collaborative exams. 1/n

Question banks & randomization won't stop team test taking/texting back and forth, unless time limit is set impossibly tightly... which means honest, but slow test takers will fail. 2/n

Could switch to collaborative, but most of my courses have many ppl who have put zero effort in. From labs, I know large % just straight copy answers from peers, so the value in terms of formative assessment is limited. One person will just complete for group in many cases. 3/n

Switching to large essay-style question exams is impossible from a marking perspective, as I have 200 students and no marking support. Besides, most of my students are ESL, so writing based answers are going to penalize them unfairly (these are fact-based courses) 4/n

Dropping final exam entirely isn't fair to the large percentage of class who, based on my eight years of teaching, would predictably do poorly on the midterm and then rally on the final (in normal years). 5/n

Individualized assessment would work for some of my smaller classes, but not for the ones where I really don't know the students at all, and where attendance was often 60% of less consistently (an ongoing problem in all of our engineering tech. courses, sadly). 6/n

Genuinely at a loss on how to proceed. Academic integrity was at a crisis point in past two years at our institution. We fought it back somewhat with rigourous invigilation last semester. Now we have no invigilators. :( 7/n

Need a solution that provides opportunities for success for the most vulnerable students. Trying to do what's best for my students, and genuinely at a loss. What have you done? 8/n