hey hey hey there online schoolin’ students, and a good evening to everyone except profs who give closed book exams during a pandemic,
this is just a friendly neighbourhood announcement that when you’re taking exams on quercus, your profs can actually see a log of your activity.
some of yall might be aware of this already, but for those of you who weren’t, figured i’d put it up on the site. i know finals season is pretty much done but this might be applicable to anyone taking summer school. share to save a life, or whatever.
so for backstory, quercus is basically the same thing as canvas, just renamed to fit u of t’s pretentious tree theme.
canvas’s official support webpage is pretty transparent about the fact that, when a quiz or test is taken on its platform, it retains a ‘quiz log’ for up to six months. what can your profs see on this log, you might wonder?
well, funny that you ask. they can actually see a second-by-second ‘action log’ of when you view, answer, and skip questions. they can see every attempt you take at a question (previous answers don’t actually get overwritten) and every attempt you take at a quiz overall, as well as how long you spent taking the quiz.
most importantly, they can see when you click away to a different tab or window. this shows up as “stopped viewing the canvas quiz-taking page.” you can see why a high recurrence of these alerts might look suspicious, especially if your mark jumps quite a lot after the assessment in question.
i’ve also heard (but don’t know where on the canvas support site to confirm this) that profs can see what course materials have been opened/are currently open/have been downloaded on your computer. because we don’t love making empty allegations, this article from the OTHER U of T, the university of texas, seems to serve as confirmation. the article also lets us know that once again, canvas/quercus does its job WAY too well and provides a briefing of how long those tabs have been open as well. which is a bit embarrassing for me, given that i never close those tabs even when i’m done with them. my profs probably think i’m obsessed with their material.
obviously, canvas/quercus activity reports will generally not be an issue if your tests are open book, or if your profs have made other provisions to prevent students from cheating. but make sure you’re clear on what’s allowed and not allowed before taking an exam on quercus, just to be safe. dodging academic integrity issues is always cool. we like that.
be Boundless,
aska