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A 20-Foot Cable And The Explosion Of Online Cheating

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Millions of college students are suddenly going to school online, whether they wanted to or not. Testing those students, administering the assessments of these newly displaced students is a major test for academia.

That’s because students cheat. They cheat a great deal, often and creatively and reliably. And they cheat more often online, which makes sense. Online, no one is looking over your shoulder. No one is there to see what you’re doing or how you’re doing it. And so, Pandora’s Box is open. The chat rooms and reddit threads are already overloaded with students sharing their cheating plans and hacks. It’s open season.

But students aren’t the only ones with newfound opportunity. Companies exist that “proctor” online exams – supervise the administration of tests and vouch for their integrity. For these companies, it’s boom times too.

“We’ve seen a ten-fold increase in colleges calling, asking for help,” said Scott McFarland, the CEO of ProctorU, the largest player in the online test integrity market. The company supervised more than 2 million exams last year alone; it has more than 250 employees and annual revenue well into eight figures. “We are easily getting 150 calls a day now, mostly from colleges scrambling to meet the new reality of having to teach and test online, needing to protect the value of their brand and the integrity of their grades and degrees.”

It’s easy to see why schools are rushing. “When a degree is gained though fraud,” McFarland said, “it undermines the image and the brand of the school and it’s deeply unfair to the majority of students who work hard, study hard to have their degree undermined by those who take shortcuts and cheat.”

It is.

Most of what ProctorU does is both highly technical and labor intensive. They use live proctors and testing monitors to literally watch students take their exams or complete work online, the same way a teacher might in a classroom. They use the computer’s cameras to see if a student is sneaking notes or using their phone to Google answers or talk to someone in the room. The company can also restrict or monitor computer features such as “cut and paste” or the ability to open new browser tabs.

But that’s all decidedly old school and outdated, according to McFarland. “In the good old days, students would just try to hide someone under a blanket under their desk,” he said. Students are far more organized, far more advanced now.

“We uncovered an entire cheating ring where a group of about 30 to 40 students were all going to a so-called tutoring office that used a device that shared one computer screen with another, running a 20-foot cable into another room where a tutor could see the student’s monitor and answer the questions, all while the students sat there and pretended to be answering.”

That kind of organized academic fraud is both common and tough to catch. But it’s just the beginning. On the high end, some specific computer hacks can be very hard to detect, even with top-level remote monitoring. McFarland described a few that sounded like they were from the Mission Impossible series, but he wisely asked they not be shared publicly. “We don’t want to highlight it and encourage it,” he said.

The examples go on and on. Clear tape on water bottles. Fake IDs. Hidden microphones and earbuds so a student can pretend to be talking to themselves but actually repeating a question and getting an answer whispered in their ear. Multiple phones – one put away, the other up and running. All made possible by being remote, online. Chances are that even a professor, deeply experienced in giving in-class, in-person tests would be gobbled up by these online cheating techniques. And the students know it. It’s hardly a contest.  

“The rate of confirmed cheating attempts, no question about it cheating, would blow you away,” McFarland said. He did not want that figure published either, but he’s right. It would blow you away. “And it’s going up,” he said. “Even during this pandemic, people are taking advantage to cheat more.”

Given the deluge of students suddenly online – many dealing with enormous personal challenges or indignant about having to study at “Zoom University,” or both – it was a given that cheating would spike. Cheating was a problem before every university went virtual. Now, the threat it poses is very actual.

Schools that don’t take it seriously, don’t prepare or prefer to ignore what’s happening will, at some point, have to answer. And not just for their school, for all schools – it’s a system-wide problem. It’s not as though no one knows it’s going on. It’s very much going on, right now and more than ever. The question is now, though, the same as it was – what are schools going to do about it?

Bringing in professional test monitors is, it seems, an essential first step. It’s implausible to formulate a counter argument, frankly. But it’s just a first step. Schools have to do much more to deal with cheating in general as well as the explosion that going completely online has created. Again, it’s happening now. It does not feel like the kind of challenge that can be addressed later.

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