Guest Article:

By Alexis Bonari

Bio: Alexis Bonari is a freelance writer and blog junkie. She is currently a resident blogger at onlinedegrees.org, researching areas of online education programs. In her spare time, she enjoys square-foot gardening, swimming, and avoiding her laptop.

The phenomenon of online assessment cheating has recently exploded from mere plagiarism to a wide variety of inventive and deceitful solutions as students continue to apply their ingenuity to the challenge of achieving academic success. As a result of the Internet’s seemingly limitless supply of information and communication methods, students have a wider window of opportunity when it comes to cheating.

The Practical Implications of Distance Learning

The physical distance between students and teachers has been addressed by experts as a contributing factor to students’ willingness to cheat online. The temptation to cheat is further exacerbated by the fact that teachers have no way of knowing what or who a student brings to an online assessment. Other enabling characteristics of online assessment include the impression that it lacks tradition, thus decreasing students’ respect for the system; the significant number of online students who experience pressure from other jobs or have other time constraints; and the general problem of new systems being used without proper debugging. One of the most prevalent issues is that of the generation gap: students tend to be tech-savvy, while instructors and administrators often demonstrate a marked ignorance of the possibilities for cheating in the realm of online assessment.

Traditional Cheating Methods with Increased Online Efficacy

Many of the cheating strategies enabled by online assessment are exaggerated versions of traditional methods, such as contract cheating and the use of forbidden sources. Predating the Internet, students have had access to “consultants” and have exercised the ability to hire tutors or other students to provide assistance during or prior to tests. However, the Internet has made a strong contribution to this style of cheating by enabling online collaboration among students during tests. In addition to the problem of authentication (matching the actual test-taker to a given student’s identity and password), the advent of online assessment has made it increasingly difficult to determine whether or not a student is alone when a test is administered.

Collaborative cheating and pirating of answers are drastically exacerbated by online testing. Because it is nearly impossible for the average teacher or professor to ensure that students’ completion of an assessment is exactly simultaneous, students have an increased opportunity to provide one another with answers before a test is closed. Students have also been documented as using spyware and “sniffers” to monitor other students as they enter answers during online assessment.

Taking Advantage of the Generation Gap

The most tech-savvy students have been found engaging in unfair re-taking of assessments and direct usurping of grading power. Engineering a crash on their own computers, they can reach the end of an assessment before claiming that lost power entitles them to a second try. To claim grading power, students can crash the server after grading has been done, but before grades have been recorded. Password theft then enables these students to enter their own grades as the teacher or professor.

Experts have drawn the comparison between computer hacking and online assessment cheating: the majority of offenses are never noticed or addressed. Students who surpass their teachers in their understanding of the assessment medium enjoy a standing invitation to engage in online cheating.