Webcam proctoring helps, but it's not a silver bullet. Commercial tools like Integrity detect plagiarism by comparing students' answers with each other. There are plugins for LMSs, like Unicheck. Gradescope uses rubric-based grading to identify students with suspiciously similar mistakes. Attend this session to learn how to improve exam integrity.
Before COVID-19, proctoring of online exams was already big business. Universities and public libraries hosted testing centers that students could visit to take their exams. A large number of companies provided online proctoring, including Examity, Krypterion, ProctorU, and Proctorio, with total revenue of over $4 billion. Once the pandemic hit, testing centers closed down, leaving webcam proctoring as the only game in town. But webcam proctoring has several limitations. It can’t see everything in the room, only what the webcam is pointing at. There might be another computer screen behind the webcam. A student might be looking down at a crib sheet or another device, and the only clue would be eye movement, which is not nearly reliable enough to justify an accusation. Further, it may be seen as an invasion of privacy for a recording to be stored of a room in one’s home, often a bedroom.
Another way to detect cheating is to look for suspicious similarities in answers. This approach could be used by itself, or in conjunction with webcam proctoring. Applications are available, such as Integrity (http://integrity.castlerockresearch.com/) and SCheck (http://wesolows.wired4wisdom.com/) that use statistical approaches to detect cheating on multiple-choice exams. Essay answers can be checked for plagiarism using an LMS plugin like Unicheck (https://moodle.org/plugins/plagiarism_unicheck) or by creating an assignment directly in Turnitin. There are also several software packages for detecting plagiarism, like CopyDetect, CopyLeaks, and textreuse, that could be incorporated into an LMS by instructional technology support staff.
Gradescope (a unit of Turnitin) is developing a rubric-based approach to detecting cheating. Gradescope allows exam papers to be scanned in, or exams to be taken online, and presented to the course staff for grading. As they grade the test papers, instructors build up a rubric that awards a certain number of points for each aspect of a correct answer or, alternatively, deducts a certain number of points for each mistake. The program then compares the scoring of each exam paper and detects pairs of students who lost (or gained) points for the same reasons on many questions on the exam.
Plagiarism detection is an active area for research and development. Future enhancements include systems that apply different statistical tests to different kinds of questions--multiple choice, essay, fill-in-the-blank, and constructed response (short answer), and combine them into a single similarity metric for the whole exam. For online tests, it’s also possible to record when a student submits each answer, and detect, for example, that one student “always” answers a question the same way, and right after another student gives the answer.
Almost everyone at an OLC conference will have some experience with exam integrity. Many will have stories to share, and strong opinions on best practices. This input, as well as the presenter’s survey of current tools, will make for a lively discussion. This year, it is more timely than ever.