Search & Destroy Guide

This guide is specific for Canvas, D2L, and Coursera, for Blackboard please click here Search and Destroy Guide- Blackboard and for Third Party Assessments, click here Search & Destroy Guide- Third Party Assesments. 

Exam content is often shared online and test takers can find exam's questions and answers with a simple Google search. Our revamped feature provides the structure to protect your exam questions, and encourages test takers to maintain integrity. 

As an instructor or exam administrator, you need clarity on which of your questions have been shared online and clear actions you can take to protect your exam's integrity.

Utilizing Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) takedown functions is part of the challenge, but what about questions that have leaked out onto multiple websites? Sending emails to several sites is not an effective solution. Honorlock's revamped Search & Destroy^TM will identify these commonly found questions, empowering you to update your exam content to be more secure. In addition, Search & Destroy^TM puts the control in your hands regarding DMCA takedown requests. You can select specific questions or send DMCA takedown notices to the entire batch with one click.

This feature is available to all Honorlock clients at no additional charge. Currently, Search & Destroy^TM may only be processed once for each exam, so please be sure your exam questions are finalized prior to beginning this process. 

How It Works (Canvas and D2L)

1) For more information on enabling your assessments with Honorlock, please visit the Using Honorlock with Canvas knowledge base article ), or Using Honorlock with D2L Brightspace, and for more information, please visit the Honorlock Knowledge Base.

2) Within the Honorlock LTI, select Results on the assessment you want to manage.

3) Navigate to the Search & Destroy^TM tab.

In this tab, the assessment’s search results will appear. Questions are placed into three categories: Compromised Items, Commonly Found Items, and Unique Items.

Compromised Items:

These questions were found on five or fewer supported websites. Honorlock can process DMCA takedown requests for several websites if the exam administrator owns the assessment content.

To initiate the DMCA takedown process for questions in the Compromised Items category, select the Send Takedown to All button. If you wish to view detailed results within this category, select the dropdown icon on the right.

Commonly Found Items:

These questions were found on more than five websites, or on zero supported websites. We recommend changing these questions.  

Unique Items:

These questions were not found in Honorlock’s search results. These are unique questions your students will likely not find online. Remember to click on the dropdown icon on the right to view detailed results of your questions for any of the result categories. 

Note: You will have the ability to manually upload questions as a CSV file in the event Honorlock is unable to automatically pull Search & Destroy^TM questions. These are the steps to follow to manually upload the questions.

1) Once you have your CSV file with the questions, navigate to the Search & Destroy^TM tab. Then proceed to click on Upload Questions Here. 

2) You will then drag or click to choose you CSV file containing the questions: 

3) Once you have selected your question file, review the questions to ensure that they have been uploaded correctly. Once you are satisfied, proceed to click on Save.

4) Refresh the screen and then navigate back to the Search & Destroy^TM tab to review the questions results.

Search and Destroy will not run for questions set up via question banks. For Canvas Classic Quizzes, if you want to run it for a large bank of questions, you can create a separate quiz assigned to no one and put all of the questions within that quiz. You can then run search and destroy for all of the questions. 

Click on Search and Destroy FAQ for Frequently Asked Questions.