The Proctor at Home: Using Technology to Keep Online Students from Cheating
As more and more students choose online courses either as alternatives to the traditional college experience or as a supplement, a lot of colleges have started to worry about how to prevent these students from cheating on remotely administered exams. According to the Chronicle of Higher Education, the U.S. Congress, too, is concerned about this and has added language into a part of legislation renewing the Higher Education Act that encourages schools to fight cheating more effectively.
Technology
While the legislation will not pass until later this year, a number of schools are already looking at high-tech solutions to proctor online exams for them. The most sophisticated of them is the Securexam Remote Proctor, a small device which features a fingerprint scanner, microphone, and a video camera with a 360 degree view. In order to start an exam, students have to prove their identity by fingerprint and during the exam, while the microphone and video look out for anything suspicious like an unknown voice or movement on the camera.
While Securexam advertises its system as promoting 'integrity and convenience,' the device looks to be anything but convenient. It only works on Windows machines and only with Internet Explorer. Given how popular Apple's computers are with students, this clearly creates problems for a large number of students.
The Remote Proctor is currently being tested by Troy University and costs around $150.
Other programs, like Kryterion's Webassessor, use a somewhat simpler solution based on webcams and biometrics. Webassessor users human proctors that watch up to 50 students each and its software analyses a student's typing style and alerts the proctors if there is a change (like when somebody else has taken over).
Challenge Questions
Axicom Corporation, which is being used by quite a few universities for their online courses, uses personal 'challenge' questions to establish the identity of a student. According to the Chronicle of Higher Education, these questions are based on data Axicom gathers from publicly available databases such as criminal files and property records (surely, nobody would want their friends to have to answer a challenge question about whether they were first arrested for arson in 1995 or 1997).
Privacy
All of these systems carry a good number of privacy issues with them, but they are also all relatively expensive. Then, of course, there are questions if cheating on online exams is even a real problem. As the article in the Chronicle of Higher Education points out, most teachers in online courses rely less on major exams and more on projects and group work anyway.
Also, no matter what the technological solution is, chances are that an intrepid cheater will always find a way around this system. Should Congress decide to make systems like this mandatory, however, then we will soon see a whole new market open up and surely other companies will come up with more solutions. The question that remains, however, is if there ever really was a problem in the first place.
What is your take on this? Do you have experience with these systems? Do you think online students need to be monitored more closely?
Photo by Flickr user dcjohn.
Share
Comments
Subscribe to comments for this post OR Subscribe to comments for all ReadWriteWeb posts
I see a parallel to DRM systems. We don't need better Student Restriction Management. Instead we need to ask what purpose exams serve and invent them out of education. What if students posted *all* of their work on their personal pages and attested to its provenance. Then basic policing is easy and the real challenge is more aligned with the educational goal: to guide the student based on his/her total state of preparedness.
If universities insist on this approach they will find themselves in an uncomfortable position like the recording industry - unable to remain as the sole sanctioning body between teacher and student and between employer and graduate.
I work for an online high school, where proctoring tests a necessary evil. Our accreditation requires that we verify and ensure a student's integrity at least at the level of a regular brick-and-mortar school; which means proctoring must happen for all our final exams, no matter how small the effect has on a student's overall grade.
However, as the article mentions, online proctoring is very expensive; currently costing the student more than their entire class with us. A new solution does need to pop out of the wood work... a cost effective solution. And as more and more classes are being delivered online, this will only become more and more important, congressional interference or not.
This is a scary and unacceptable invasion of students' privacy, especially the personal background and biometric data.
I'm a university professor and I sometimes teach online courses. The tests I design are such that someone who has not taken the course can't answer the questions just based on a textbook or study materials.
I'd rather live with cheating than with such invasive systems, but I whole-heartedly agree with comment #1, that if we redesign education, we have to do so from the ground up.
as an online student, i have to agree that it is entirely possible to have a course in which not only is the book open in front of you, but you have the entire internet at your searchtips, yet the course can be designed for actual learning rather than just standardized test results. that is the problem with American education, we are concentrating too much on multiple choice tests that everyone can pass by rout memorization rather than learning problem solving skills that enhance absorption and utilization
Posted by: Nathan Eckenrode
|
July 26, 2008 7:07 AM
Nathan: When you say that this is the problem with American education, do you mean in contrast to some other form of education? I understand it's far worse in other countries, especially ones that churn out "smarter" graduates (like Japan). Honestly curious if there's a better way out there.
Posted by: Brent Newhall
|
July 26, 2008 7:51 AM
@Nathan - Just an observation. I'm from India. Just finished High School. Atleast you had to just rote-learn multiple choice questions. We had to rote learn questions with answers several pages long.
Posted by: Yuvi
|
July 26, 2008 9:21 AM
What's the privacy issue?
Posted by: Bjorn Tipling
|
July 26, 2008 9:25 AM
@Bjorn - the privacy issue comes in when the online school forces you to install a camera on your computer that monitors your environment while you take an exam. Not sure how much of a problem that would be for most people, but it is definitely a concern. As for learning styles, I have spoken with teachers in online school since I wrote this and they all stressed what I wrote in the article. Online courses (at least for colleges) shouldn't focus on exams too much and more on projects and group work.
Posted by: Frederic
|
July 26, 2008 9:34 AM
Students in traditional classes cheat: they cheat themselves by looking at other people's exams, they cheat themselves by text messaging, and they cheat themselves by writing answers on their hands. Instead, what is the purpose of the class? If I am taking a class to gain a higher wage (simply by taking the class) then I am not as motivated. Instead, if I am learning something valuable then I am all over the topic.
Posted by: LPH
|
July 26, 2008 9:43 AM