How should bathroom breaks be handled during written exams to avoid cheating?
How do other uni's deal with this?
I've attended courses in two universities and have been an exam supervisor in another academical institution. In all those cases only one student could go to the bathroom at a time. A supervisor would accompany the student up to the bathroom door and wait until the student would return.
Sure, the student could hide a book, laptop, anything in the toilet stall. If it's a good exam these methods are not going to get the student anywhere as a good academical test requires that the student can use his brain, not just reproduce knowledge from a book. Therefore I think making a big deal of cheat prevention is not necessary.
What's the best solution?
Not allowing students to take bathroom breaks is inhumane. I think the solution I experienced and described above is the best you'll get without exaggerating.
Forbidding use of restroom facilities is extreme and more than a little ridiculous. If a student is resourceful enough to defeat your exam's purpose (which should be to measure a student's capability in a particular subject) without your certain discovery given only the use of a few minutes and a toilet, then probably your exam needs some work and/or that student deserves whatever grade he/she is awarded.
What's more, forbidding the use of facilities comes with some liability. From Brian Freeman, Esq.'s Bathroom Rights:
...The same court said, in an earlier case, “However primitive and ordinary, the right to defecate and to urinate without awaiting the permission of government…are rights close to the core of the liberty guaranteed by the due process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. When government undertakes to eliminate or to impair either or both of these rights, it should be required to make a strong showing of necessity for the restrictive measure.” Indeed, we all have the “basic liberty of access to the bathroom when needed.”
People who believe they have the authority to deny access to a bathroom, especially teachers and educators throughout the country, need to be aware that denial of a pupil’s right to use the toilet could carry significant liabilities. Under 42 U.S.C. § 1983, a state actor can be held liable for both compensatory and punitive damages, including paying for the winner’s attorney’s fees.
In addition to liability under § 1983, a defendant could also be held liable for intentional infliction of emotional distress. Depending on the facts of the case, other potential liabilities could arise from prohibiting a person from their bona fide need for access to a toilet. For these reasons, all people, especially young students, ought to be able to use the restroom whenever needed, without be required to first obtain permission.
First as a student, and then over 28 years as a teacher (first at high school and then at university) I've witnessed all sort of cheating strategies: appointments at the restrooms, radios (when cellphones didn't exist), programmable pocket calculators stored with a wealth of information (and with the reset procedure duly intercepted in case the professor used to pass to reset all the calculators), girls with pieces of paper attached to the legs under the skirt, etc.
So, my point is: if students want to cheat, they will.
Strict vigilance might give students a hard time cheating, but do we really want to spend our time and TAs' time watching students and escorting them to the restrooms? During a 2-4 hours exam I can do a bit of useful work: research, preparing the next exam, grading other exam papers, reading a paper... and if I really want to spend some time doing nothing, I'd rather read a novel than staring at one hundred faces.
Therefore, my suggested strategy against cheating, any kind of cheating, is: design the exam as to make cheating as ineffective as possible, and as detectable as possible during the grading phase (multiple choice questions? no, thanks).