Western Governors University (WGU) is an online, nonprofit university focused on competency-based programs that are student-centric. The integrity of the WGU degree is of utmost importance to the university’s credibility. The WGU Assessment Security uses cutting-edge technology with WGU’s WebCrawler and other tools to enhance academic integrity.
Western Governors University (WGU) is an online, nonprofit university focused on competency-based programs that are student-centric. The degrees awarded are based on a valid expression of competency and assessments are used to determine that competency. The integrity of the WGU degree is of utmost importance to the university’s credibility. The WGU Academic Authenticity and Assessment Security Team (AS Team) is comprised of nearly 20 members who review and ensure the authenticity of high stakes performance and objective assessments.
The authenticity is supported through the use of plagiarism checks, investigations, training, student orientation, online proctored exams, secret shopping, Security Scorecards, web patrol, and outreach. A variety of tools are used to accomplish this task, and a little over a year ago, WGU began searching for a tool that would provide the ability to search and securely monitor possible postings of WGU copyrighted material. This in turn would allow the investigation of exposures to ensure the validity of the assessments given, thus supporting the overall integrity of the university. At the time, the team could not find anything that was workable, so, in true WGU fashion, it was developed – enter the Owlbot.
The idea for a specific WGU WebCrawler was brought to a third party already working within the assessment delivery platform, Excelsoft. Excelsoft developed the WebCrawler, known as Owlbot, within specific guidelines requested by WGU’s Assessment Security and Academic Authenticity Team (AS Team). The brand new technology was developed from scratch during the collaboration.
The WGU AS Team logs in through a two-factor verification process to limit access to assessment material to verified employees. The specific websites to be crawled are entered by the AS Team. The application then crawls and indexes all available pages of the selected sites. Once indexing is complete the application will search the categories (assessments) and keywords (question stems) that have also been inputted by the AS Team and show the matching material for each. The search is completed within the application to ensure that WGU assessment material is not exposed as part of the search process. An AS Team member reviews the matches to determine if there is a concern and marks the material as an issue, under review, or not a concern. For those matches that are issues, a Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) takedown notification is processed as a document, after being auto-populated within the application, and sent to the offending website. Once the material is removed, the link is archived. If there is no concern, the match is ignored and will not show up on future indexes. This will narrow the search each time and filter out the noise seen in manual internet searches thereby increasing efficiency.
So far over 3,000 urls containing WGU information have been taken down using the Owlbot!