How HiPeople Supports Cheating Prevention

The rapid development of generative AI has introduced new challenges for maintaining assessment integrity. As AI tools become increasingly capable of solving complex problems, interpreting information, and completing tasks autonomously, concerns about AI-assisted cheating in online assessments continue to grow.

Despite these advancements, HiPeople’s assessment data tell an encouraging story. Average scores have remained relatively stable over the past three years, with no consistent upward trend as AI capabilities have advanced.

Figure 1. Assessment score trends amid advances in generative AI (2023–2026). Average scores across five HiPeople assessments show no systematic increase despite major developments in AI technology.

While stable scores cannot rule out individual instances of cheating, these findings provide encouraging evidence that widespread score inflation has not occurred across the assessments examined. HiPeople’s approach to maintaining assessment integrity combines psychologically informed interventions with thoughtful assessment design, including integrity pledges, contextualized assessments, customized content, work simulations, multimodal evaluation, and appropriate time limits.

The following sections explain the rationale behind these strategies and how they are incorporated into the HiPeople assessment experience.

Integrity pledges: encouraging honest participation

HiPeople incorporates an integrity pledge into the assessment experience in order to establish expectations regarding honest and independent participation. From a psychological perspective, honesty reminders can increase the salience of ethical expectations and encourage candidates to consider their responsibility to provide an accurate representation of their abilities. By making expectations explicit, integrity pledges may also reduce ambiguity about permitted and prohibited behavior.

Mukherjee et al. (2023) investigated three nonintrusive cheating-prevention interventions in an online testing experiment involving 997 participants. The researchers found that an honor-code reminder presented during the assessment reduced the odds of cheating compared with a control condition. The interventions did not significantly affect user experience or test-taking self-efficacy.

HiPeople’s approach

By incorporating an integrity pledge, HiPeople communicates clear ethical expectations and encourages candidates to approach assessments honestly. This provides a preventive measure without relying on intrusive monitoring.

Figure 2. HiPeople’s integrity pledge. Candidates are encouraged to commit to honesty and independent participation before completing their assessment, reinforcing ethical expectations and promoting a fair and trustworthy testing environment.

Situational Judgment Tests: evaluating contextualized decisions

Situational judgment tests (SJTs) present realistic workplace situations and ask candidates to evaluate potential responses. Unlike traditional self-report questions, which may ask candidates to describe their personal qualities directly, SJTs require them to consider how different courses of action would address a particular workplace challenge. For example, rather than asking whether a candidate demonstrates effective teamwork, an SJT might describe a disagreement between colleagues and ask the candidate to identify the most appropriate response.

Psychological rationale

Situational judgment tests (SJTs) can help reduce susceptibility to dishonest responding by requiring candidates to evaluate realistic workplace situations rather than simply describe themselves in a favorable way. Danner et al. (2026) investigated this in an experimental study involving 256 participants who completed both an SJT and a traditional self-report assessment under honest and deliberately favorable responding conditions. The researchers found that faking had a substantially smaller effect on SJT scores (d = 0.25) than on self-report scores (d = 1.04). Furthermore, the SJT maintained its validity under faking conditions, while the self-report measure showed reduced construct validity. These findings suggest that thoughtfully designed SJTs can be more resistant to response manipulation, supporting their use in selection processes where authentic candidate responses are essential.

HiPeople’s approach

HiPeople offers SJTs that assess job-relevant competencies through realistic workplace situations. Carefully designed scenarios and plausible response options support the evaluation of applied judgment rather than relying exclusively on candidates’ direct descriptions of their qualities.

Customized assessment content: reducing predictability

HiPeople works with organizations to develop assessment content tailored to their specific roles, values, competency frameworks, and workplace challenges. Customization can contribute to assessment security by reducing reliance on standardized, widely circulated assessment questions.

Assessment-security rationale

When assessment content is repeatedly used and publicly accessible, candidates may have opportunities to memorize answers or obtain them from external preparation resources. Organization-specific content can make such strategies less transferable. Customized assessments may also require candidates to interpret situations that are less familiar and more closely aligned with the target role.

HiPeople’s approach

HiPeople can develop organization-specific scenarios, technical questions, and situational judgment assessments aligned with a customer’s requirements.

This approach provides several potential advantages:

• Reduced reliance on widely circulated questions.
• Lower transferability of answers between organizations.
• Greater alignment with the competencies relevant to the position, and therefore stronger predictive validity.
• Opportunities to develop varied scenarios targeting similar competencies.

Work simulations: assessing applied competence

Work simulations present candidates with realistic tasks or workplace challenges that resemble activities they may encounter in the target role. Rather than relying exclusively on questions about what candidates know, simulations provide opportunities to demonstrate how they apply their knowledge, judgment, and skills in practical situations. Depending on the position, this may involve prioritizing customer requests, interpreting technical information, managing competing deadlines, or responding to workplace challenges.

Psychological rationale

Simulations provide opportunities to observe how candidates apply their knowledge and judgment rather than relying exclusively on self-reported abilities or isolated factual questions. Multi-step and contextualized tasks may also reduce the usefulness of memorized answers, particularly when tasks involve organization-specific information or variable inputs. For example, a customer service simulation requiring candidates to prioritize several incoming requests and explain their decisions involves a more integrated demonstration of competence than recalling a single customer service principle, and also allows less opportunity for AI assisted test-taking.

HiPeople’s approach

HiPeople develops customized simulations that reflect practical workplace challenges. These assessments allow candidates to demonstrate job-relevant judgment and problem-solving through contextualized tasks. They can also generate specific examples of candidate performance that organizations may explore further during subsequent stages of the hiring process.

Figure 3. HiPeople’s customized work simulation. An interactive customer support simulation in which candidates handle realistic support tickets, prioritize issues, determine appropriate actions, and draft customer responses, demonstrating job-relevant judgment and problem-solving skills in a practical workplace context.

Multimodal assessment: combining complementary evidence

HiPeople supports a multimodal assessment approach combining methods such as cognitive ability tests, technical knowledge assessments, SJTs, and behavioral measures. Different assessment methods capture different aspects of candidate capabilities, providing organizations with a broader evidence base for hiring decisions.

Psychological rationale

Candidates may find certain forms of assessment easier to manipulate than others. For example, deliberately presenting oneself favorably on a behavioral questionnaire involves a different response process than solving a technical problem or interpreting a complex workplace scenario. By combining complementary assessment formats, organizations can evaluate candidates across multiple dimensions rather than relying exclusively on one type of response. A multimodal approach can provide a more comprehensive picture of candidates’ capabilities and reduce dependence on any single assessment score.

HiPeople’s approach

HiPeople combines different assessment formats to evaluate the knowledge, cognitive abilities, and behavioral competencies relevant to specific roles. This approach enables organizations to draw on multiple sources of assessment evidence, supporting more informed hiring decisions and reducing reliance on any single method.

Time limits: reducing opportunities for external assistance

Time limits can serve as an additional measure to support assessment integrity by restricting the amount of time candidates have to seek external assistance during an assessment. When candidates have unlimited time, they may have greater opportunities to search for answers online, consult other individuals, or use generative AI tools. Appropriate time constraints can make these strategies less practical by requiring candidates to respond within a defined period.

Psychological rationale

Time limits influence how candidates allocate their attention and approach problem-solving tasks. By establishing a structured assessment window, they may reduce opportunities for extensive external consultation and encourage candidates to rely on their existing knowledge and abilities. However, time pressure must be carefully balanced. Excessively restrictive limits can increase cognitive load, encourage guessing, and interfere with the reasoning processes an assessment is intended to measure. The objective is therefore not to maximize time pressure, but to introduce appropriate constraints that support assessment integrity without undermining measurement quality.

HiPeople’s approach

HiPeople conducts pilot studies before each assessment is published to determine an appropriate time limit. This use of timed assessments provides candidates with a defined period to demonstrate their capabilities, helping limit opportunities for extensive external consultation. Appropriate time constraints support a structured testing environment while allowing candidates sufficient opportunity to demonstrate the knowledge and abilities being assessed. By balancing assessment security with psychometric considerations, time limits can contribute to a fair and meaningful evaluation process.

Conclusion

Cheating prevention in online assessments requires a combination of behavioral interventions and thoughtful assessment design. At HiPeople, integrity pledges encourage candidates to commit to honest participation. At the same time, situational judgment tests, customized content, and work simulations support the evaluation of job-relevant capabilities through contextualized assessment experiences. Multimodal assessment provides complementary evidence of candidate strengths and abilities, and appropriate time limits can help reduce opportunities for extensive external assistance. Although no single strategy can eliminate cheating, combining these approaches supports a more robust assessment process without compromising the importance of validity, fairness, and candidate experience. Our focus is on designing assessments that encourage honest participation and provide organizations with reliable, relevant information to support better hiring decisions.