  Historically, the implementation of research-based assessments (RBAs) has
been a driver of educational change within physics and helped motivate adoption
of interactive engagement pedagogies. Until recently, RBAs were given to
students exclusively on paper and in-class; however, this approach has
important drawbacks including decentralized data collection and the need to
sacrifice class time. Recently, some RBAs have been moved to online platforms
to address these limitations. Yet, online RBAs present new concerns such as
student participation rates, test security, and students' use of outside
resources. Here, we report on a study addressing these concerns in both
upper-division and lower-division undergraduate physics courses. We gave RBAs
to courses at five institutions; the RBAs were hosted online and featured
embedded JavaScript code which collected information on students' behaviors
(e.g., copying text, printing). With these data, we examine the prevalence of
these behaviors, and their correlation with students' scores, to determine if
online and paper-based RBAs are comparable. We find that browser loss of focus
is the most common online behavior while copying and printing events were
rarer. We found that correlations between these behaviors and student
performance varied significantly between introductory and upper-division
student populations, particularly with respect to the impact of students
copying text in order to utilize internet resources. However, while the
majority of students engaged in one or more of the targeted online behaviors,
we found that, for our sample, none of these behaviors resulted in a
significant change in the population's average performance that would threaten
our ability to interpret this performance or compare it to paper-based
implementations of the RBA.
