We all cheat a bit...even teachers!

My wife is a teacher and is always finding kids coming up with ways to cheat on tests - aside from the technology, it's still the same as it was when I was in school.

Recently the director of technology in her school district wanted to get a feel for what types of computers people wanted to use in their classrooms.  They put up a simple web page that had a drop-down field for the school you were in, and a simple selection of the type of computer OS (Apple or Windows, sorry my fellow Linux users).  The site went live and people started using it.  Unfortunatly there were a few flaws.

The first flaw is that many users didn't notice the drop-down to change the school - the default school in the list was getting many more votes than the number of teachers on staff!

The second flaw was that you could hit the back button and see how people voted.  Not a big deal here, but it meant that if a common computer was used by a few people, if the first person didn't choose the correct school, the others probably didn't either.

That brings us to the third flaw - vote stuffing.  A few teachers found that it was possible to go back and re-submit their last vote over, and over, and over, and over, and over...  Again, there were some schools that had many more votes than teachers.

So, what is a person to to?

Check out GoPollGo: http://gopollgo.com/

In just a few moments of entering the question, and some options, you've created a quick polling page:

After voting, the poll page then removes the ability to change selection, plus it highlights the map to show the breakdown by country, state, and even county.

See for yourself.

Sadly, it doesn't have the ability to break down by a custom field (i.e. school), but at least this would keep the ballot stuffing to a minimum.

If per-school statistics were required, it would be very quick to setup a few private poll links for each school and distribute accordingly.

At the end of the day, honest people want to be honest, and cheaters will always try to cheat.  With GoPollGo, only the cheaters will be the ones complaining.