Prevent gibberish responses, without the response quality module | XM Community
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Hello,
I am conducting a survey study using Qualtrics. There is an open ended text box in the survey that asks for a 400 word response. Users get a gift card if they complete the survey. Some people have completed the open ended box with gibberish (e.g., asdf yy ii) to achieve the gift card. I want to prevent this as much as possible. I have set a validation of the text box to only accept responses with 400+ words.
I want to prevent users from entering non-sense into the text box just to get through the survey and collect their gift card. I was thinking of using javascript to count the number of misspelled words in the textbox and if it exceeds a value the user would either be directed to an alternative end of the survey (where they do not collect the gift card) or be given a prompt to complete the text box with a valid response.
I did not have access the response quality module of qualtrics. I want to do this in javascript as much as possible.
Thanks!
Matthew

I was asked to develop a gibberish detector several years ago.
A couple of observations:

  1. Counting the number of misspelled words probably isn't the best approach

  2. You'll probably need a web service (JavaScript can execute a web service using ajax)

Anyway, I created a web service that calculates a Markov chain probability to determine if gibberish has been entered, and I think it works pretty well. Here is a preview.


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