Hi Phillip,

My comments in-line;

1. I'd like to prevent a student from getting someone else's solution,
opening it up and making some changes, and then submitting it as his
or her own. Here's what might work: something to generate individual
Excel file templates for them to do their work on that are encoded
with a unique key for each student that can't be removed and that can
be easily checked. This will make sure that the students don't simply
email their work to each other, make changes on the file, and submit
it as their own. I've programmed something like this in VBA, with a
VBA checker, but after a lot of time programming, it didn't port to
the mac environment.

You could try Dermot Balson's stenography code to embed unique codes in a
workbook. See
http://www.westnet.net.au/balson/Mod...werTools.shtml

If you use this approach to embed student names in a data column, you may be
able to catch out those people who copy all the workbook, including the
data. Not perfect, because you could not stop someone from just copying the
solution.

Since you just need to encode a data column, you do not need to store VBA
code in the workbook. You would need to run the code on each student's
workbook on your own PC.

2. I'd like to prevent a student from opening up his (presumably
uniquely keyed) template next to someone else's and cutting and
pasting the solution into his template. I don't know what would work
for this.

I don't know either. You can run code to disable paste on a workbook, but it
is trivial to circumvent, just open the workbook with macros disabled.

Ed Ferrero
www.edferrero.com