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Copy & Paste Alerts (Gold Plan Feature)
Copy & Paste Alerts (Gold Plan Feature)

Formative lets you know when students have copied and pasted parts of their responses to questions.

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Written by Lauren Sprowl
Updated over a week ago

What are Copy & Paste alerts?

One of our features, available to Gold Plan schools and districts, to help ensure secure assessment is the Copy / Paste Alert. This alert is designed to show whenever a student uses any copy and paste function -- this could include CTRL C/V keyboard short-cuts, right-clicking the mouse to select copy/paste, etc..

If a student has used these functions, you will see an exclamation mark alert that reads, "This response includes copy & pasted parts."

At this time, Formative shows this alert as a way to make you aware that students used this function. The only question type that will actually show you what was copied and pasted is Short Answer. You can click on the small i icon in the alert to view what was copied and pasted into the student response. The alert will not appear if a student copies and pastes a part of their own response. Only outside items.

Teacher discretion is required for this alert, so we never auto-grade these responses as incorrect.

Common non-cheating reasons for this alert to appear

  • World Languages classes: copying words with special characters

  • All content areas: copying parts of a question to use as a sentence starter

  • Copying words that are difficult to spell from the question or another source

  • Using some Chrome extensions, such as "Grammarly" to accept suggestions for their writing

It could be helpful to let your students know that you are aware when they use any copy/paste function, but that this does not always indicate cheating.

For tips on how students in World Languages classes can add accent marks and other special characters, check out our Tips for World Languages Teachers article.

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