Students Say Remote Proctoring Deters Cheating
Plus, remote test proctoring corresponds to reduced performance. Plus, the UK warns schools about cyber attacks from cheating companies.
Issue 45
Research Survey on Remote Exam Proctoring: Students Say It Deters Cheating
Researchers at George Washington University have published a paper - a survey of students - on remote exam proctoring.
Even though it’s sure to be misquoted, the paper is clearly about what people think about proctoring, not about proctoring. The fourth sentence in the paper’s abstract is pretty clear on this:
In this paper, we explore the security and privacy perceptions of the student test-takers being proctored.
They italicized “perceptions.” And by focusing on “security and privacy,” it’s pretty clear where they are going.
Even so, I honestly don’t know how much weight to put behind a survey with 102 responses with participants partially sourced on Reddit. And those aren’t the only concerns; there are some obvious and big problems with the survey questions. Overall, the paper has more holes than the Swiss cheese in the Vatican cafeteria.
Nonetheless, the results say that students think proctoring helps deter cheating. From the paper:
Online exam proctoring is perceived as a deterrent to cheating. When asked if online exam proctoring makes it less likely for them to cheat, 63 % (n = 65) of participants agreed or strongly agreed, while only 26 % (n = 26) disagreed or strongly disagreed.
63-26. Interesting.
This was also interesting:
There was a split between those who agreed that online exam proctoring offered a reasonable trade-off between personal privacy and exam integrity and those who disagreed (Q37). Forty-one percent (n = 42) of participants agreed (n = 30; 29 %) or strongly agreed (n = 12; 12 %) while 39 % (n = 39) of participants disagreed (n = 24; 24 %) or strongly disagreed (n = 15; 15 %).
As is that, according to the survey, half of students found online exam proctoring to be “a good solution for monitoring remote exams.” In other words, even in a survey probably designed to surface criticisms of proctoring, most students say it deters cheating and a plurality recognize a “reasonable trade-off” between academic integrity and privacy.
Research: Remote Test Proctoring Corresponds with Lower Grades, More Drops
The National Bureau on Economic Research (NBER) published a working paper by researchers from Auburn University, Southern Mississippi University and American University.
The study is massive, encompassing a sample of 18,121 students and 1,086 unique instructors with transcript and course and grade data from across three semesters - before and during the pandemic. It’s a look at whether online college classes and programs are working - the authors say they are not.
I’m including a bit of it here because one of the reasons the researchers say students are doing less well in online classes is cheating. In particular, they find that lack of cheating deterrents is artificially inflating grades and pass rates, masking the otherwise poor outcomes in online settings. Where F2F is face-to-face courses, the paper reports:
instructors teaching online courses may be more lenient in their approach to grading than instructors teaching F2F courses. Aside from leniency, a related factor may be the difficulty of preventing academic integrity violations in online courses relative to F2F courses.
The researchers offer those possibilities based in part on grades and other outcomes observed when a teacher does or does not engage online proctoring as part of an assessment regime. Again, this is student level, classroom and teacher-specific data. On proctoring, the paper reports:
the use of online proctoring is associated with lower grades, a higher tendency of withdrawing from a course, and a lower likelihood of receiving a passing grade of A, B, C, or D, after controlling for time-invariant differences across students and instructors. For example, students in online courses in which the instructors use online proctoring are 3.4 percentage points more likely to withdraw from their course and 3.7 percentage points less likely to receive a passing grade.
That does not answer the “why” part of the correlation, though the implication - that lack of proctoring makes cheating, higher grades and persistence more likely - is clear.
The finding of lower scores when remote test proctoring is used has also been observed in at least two other studies, one last year.
UK Warns of Cyber Attacks from Essay Mills
A technology security provider in the U.K. has officially warned schools to prepare for cyber attacks from essay mills.
These dark profiteers are regularly attempting to gain access to school networks and infrastructure to gain leverage over students and schools, boost their own credibility by implied affiliation or increase their Internet search rankings by linking to legitimate educational sites. In this case, the U.K. warning relates to ransom attacks.
In The States, the warnings should come as no surprise as cheating providers have already hacked the websites of more than 100 colleges and universities (see Issue 9) and present an ongoing cyber security threat (see Issue 42).
According to the news coverage, a spokesperson for the U.K. government education watchdog said,
Essay mills present a threat to the world-class reputation of UK higher education. These companies are unscrupulous and their exploitation of students risks their academic and future careers, while opening them up to blackmail and cyber crime.
Their only motivation is money, so we need action from governments and online platforms to make operation as difficult as possible.
In the next “The Cheat Sheet” - No reply yet from Florida International University on CBS accidently catching a paid essay writer in Kenya logging into its LMS to submit work for a student. Plus, the student who says they were blackmailed by a cheating site has agreed to an interview. Plus, more cheating.
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