Activity Monitoring and/or Restrictions give teachers a start-to-finish view of student participation in Socrative so you can better manage assessment integrity and intervene when necessary, all while measuring student learning progress.
✍️ Activity Monitoring provides context, not conclusions. Please note that recorded activity cannot prove on its own whether a student acted with academic integrity. Please use it alongside your classroom knowledge and any follow-up with the student.
Who can use Activity Monitoring or Restrictions?
Activity Monitoring is available on Socrative Pro, for quizzes run in a rostered room.
You turn it on for each quiz session, so you decide when it's appropriate. For example, use it for an official assessment and leave it off for low-stakes practice.
Restrictions are only available for our organization or school plans.
💡 Activity Monitoring and Restrictions are off by default.
If you move from Pro to a lower plan, you can still view activity from your past sessions for 30 days. After that, activity is no longer available to view, and you can't turn on Activity Monitoring for new quizzes unless you're on Pro.
Turn on Activity Monitoring or Restrictions
Go to the Launch tab.
Select Quiz, then choose the quiz you want to launch.
Choose your Delivery Method and quiz settings.
Turn on Activity Monitoring and/or Restrictions
Review your settings and click Launch.
Before they start, students see the below notice listing the kinds of activity that are recorded. Recording begins once the quiz starts.
View activity during a quiz
Open the Live Results tab for the quiz.
Select Activity Monitoring.
The view updates as students work. Some events can take 20–30 seconds to appear.
Activity Monitoring can record:
Focus loss and time away, when a student moves away from the quiz (for example, to another tab, window, or app)
Window resizing
Pasting text that was copied from outside the quiz. Copying and pasting quiz content isn't recorded.
For each student, you can see the type of activity, when it happened, how long they were away, and the number of events. Each event includes a short explanation, including common non-cheating causes such as translate or read-aloud tools. You can filter events by signal strength. Student names are hidden by default.
✍️ Very brief focus changes may not be recorded, so an accidental, momentary switch may not appear.
Review activity after a quiz
Activity stays available after the session ends.
Open the quiz results and select the Activity tab.
Select a student to see their activity timeline.
Activity is visible only to the teacher who ran the quiz. Activity data stays in Socrative and can't be exported.
What Activity Monitoring can and can't do
It can:
Record activity on the device and browser the student is using for the quiz
Show supported events, such as a student leaving the quiz
Fullscreen: Student entered or exited Fullscreen mode.
Paste: Text was pasted into an answer field from outside of the quiz, this is capped at 150 characters.
Tab switch: Student navigated to a new or existing tab.
Focus: The quiz window stopped being the active window.
Window resize: The browser/app window changed size.
Right-click: The student right-clicked or long pressed somewhere on the page. This can signal that they were trying to copy, search, or inspect something through the context menu.
Copy: Student copied text from the quiz. This can signal that content was lifted to save or reuse somewhere else.
It can't:
Detect activity on another device, such as a separate phone, tablet, or computer
Tell you whether a student cheated
Penalize a student, change their score, or remove them from a quiz
Detect Screenshots: When a student captures a screenshot during a quiz.
Detect Screen recording: When a student starts recording their screen, or recording is already active when the quiz begins.
Detect Screen mirroring: When a student starts mirroring their screen, or mirroring is already active when the quiz begins.
Each student's timeline holds up to 300 events and up to 10 attempts. Socrative reports what it observes and you and your school can interpret it in context, along with anything else you know about the situation.
🚨 Please note that there can be false positives associated with Assistive Tools. They can occur when (but not limited to) using screen readers, translation tools, and other assistive extensions sometimes live in their own tab that a student switches to routinely, Reflexive muscle-memory Ctrl+A/Ctrl+C without intent, Assistive tools like screen readers may copy text to read aloud.
What does Restrictions do?
Enabling Restrictions applies the following settings together:
Restriction | What it does |
Copy, cut & paste | Prevents students from copying quiz content or pasting content into their answers. |
Text selection | Prevents students from highlighting question text, including for searching or translation. |
Right-click & long-press menus | Limits access to context menus that provide options such as copying, searching, or translating text. |
Students can still type, navigate within, and edit their own answers.
✍️ Restrictions may interfere with assistive technologies, including some screen readers, translation tools, and dictation methods. Consider your students' accessibility needs and your school's policies before enabling them.
Restrictions are designed to limit certain actions, but they cannot prevent every method of accessing or sharing quiz content.
Some device-specific actions, particularly long-press menus on mobile devices, may not be fully restricted.
Restrictions do not prevent students from using another device.
Some keyboard features or alternative input methods may behave differently depending on the device.