CodeHS Honor Code
First and foremost, we highly encourage your students to sign the CodeHS Honor Code. This will help set the tone for the rest of the year around what is acceptable and what is not. Creating a class culture of good digital citizenship and establishing ground rules can go a long way in preventing student cheating.
Code History
The Code History tab is a way for teachers and students to see all of the changes and revisions that have been made to a certain program. It is accessible on any code editor page under the More > History tab in the top right corner. You can use arrows to quickly move back and forth between timestamps of code.
Code History is a great tool to aid in cheat detection, as teachers can assume that exercises (particularly more complex exercises) which are completed quickly with very few code runs/saves are often attributable to borrowed or copied code. Teachers can also see the total time spent on an assignment from the Grade tab, located on the right side of the IDE. Check out Grading a Single Assignment to learn more!
Actions that cause an entry to be created in the History tab:
Student runs code
Student clicks save
Student pastes text in the editor
It's been a minute and none of things have happened but the code has changed
Teacher edits code and Pushes changes to student program
Alternate Exercises
Alternate exercises are different versions of existing assignments in CodeHS courses. These assignments are changed in subtle ways so that the core concept and difficulty are not altered, but a different autograded solution is required. You can switch out specific assignments in your course to help deter cheating. See Using Alternate Exercises to learn more!
Advanced Settings
On the Section Settings page, Pro teachers have access to three features that can help prevent student cheating:
Shuffle Quiz Questions
Copy/Paste Prevention
Private CodeHS.me Page
Click the gear icon in the top-right corner of your roster page to access the Section Settings page:
Then, scroll to the bottom to find Advanced Settings:
Shuffle Quiz Questions: allows teachers to configure quiz questions so they will be ordered randomly for each student. The ordering will change each time the quiz is viewed. This is a feature that can help with cheating prevention on tests. As a teacher, the quiz questions will not be shuffled when you view them.
Copy/Paste Prevention: when Copy/Paste Prevention is enabled, students enrolled in this section can no longer Copy, Paste, or Cut to and from the Editor or their Sandbox.
Private CodeHS.me Page: Enable this feature to prevent students' codehs.me homepages from being shared on the web.
Time Tracking
This tool displays how long students have spent on an assignment. You can find the Time Tracking tool under the Progress view.
Calculating Time on CodeHS
As soon as the Code Editor loads, time tracking begins for students. The tracker records every increment of 5 seconds that the student is active. Students become idle after 30 seconds of not moving their mouse or typing.
Want more info on these tools? Watch our CodeHS Cheat Detection Teacher Meetup!
Time Tracking and Advanced Settings are available on CodeHS Pro. To get Pro for your school, contact our team at hello@codehs.com.