[
Moderation: Moved from Arts&Pubs]
"A lot of colleges have started to worry about how to prevent these students from cheating on remotely administered exams"
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.
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
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.
Written by Frederic Lardinois / July 25, 2008
http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/online_students_cheating_fraud_technology.php
