On January 14th, science teacher Jennifer McGuinn announced a new testing policy tailored to combat cheating.

McGuinn was prompted to create this policy after dealing with instances of cheating in her class.

“They are going to have to put the cell phones at the front of the room in a basket, backpacks are going to be along the side of the wall, and nobody sits at the back lab benches,” McGuinn said.

McGuinn will begin to utilize a computer program that creates different versions of the same test for each class, arranging the questions in random order. McGuinn suggested that this will most likely make the tests harder, since questions will be in a random order and not grouped together by similarity.

“The slight differences in the two of them would make it obvious if someone was looking at somebody else’s,” McGuinn said.

McGuinn spoke with fellow environmental chemistry teachers, guidance, and administration when creating the policy.

“Now that I know that somebody in my class was doing something to cheat, and I’m aware of what that was, I have to switch things so they can’t do it in the same way,” McGuinn said. “You have to try and stay ahead of it.”

Currently, the policy is effective only for McGuinn’s environmental chemistry classes; other science teachers are thinking about coming up with similar policies.

“I think that’s one of the hurtful things about cheating; you want to respect kids and believe them. You don’t want to take things away like trust,” McGuinn said. “So when you come up with policies, it takes a little piece of you trusting them and respecting them away. I would hate to see us in complete lockdown.”

EDITOR’S NOTE: This article has been revised to further protect student identity. In the original article, no students were identified by name.