How to prevent cheating by using highly interactive student specific online home activities in a large general education class

Energy Conservation and Environmental Protection (EGEE 102) has been taught at Perm State since the fall of 2001. Over the past seven semesters the enrollment has increased from 69 to 760. With this phenomenal growth, issues such as cheating in homework assignments needed to be addressed. To address this issue, four home activities (simulations) using Macromedia Flash were developed. The goal of these simulations is to engage students through animations and enable students to calculate their energy consumption, analyze their energy consumption patterns and utility bills, understand the economics of insulation addition, and conduct an energy audit on a virtual home. Each of the students worked with a unique data set for each of these activities. The data sets for energy consumption of appliances or monthly energy bills for each student are generated using PERL scripts and are retained in the MySQL database. These student specific datasets are delivered through the flash simulations. The students complete the required activity and submit their results via the Flash interface. The submitted values are automatically compared with the student-specific data sets and the correct numerical answers as calculated by the PHP script. This process minimized the time required for the instructor to grade the reports, increased faculty efficiency, reduced grading errors, and counters plagiarism as duplicate submissions are ineffective.