Machine learning has evolved and expanded as an interdisciplinary research method for educational sciences. However, cheating detection of test collusion among multiple examinees or sets of examinees with unusual answer patterns using machine learning techniques has remained relatively unexplored. This study investigates collusion on…

Academic misconduct stemming from file-sharing websites is an increasingly prevalent challenge in tertiary education, including information technology and engineering disciplines. Current plagiarism detection methods (e.g., text matching) are largely ineffective for combatting misconduct in programming and mathematics-based assessments. For these…

This article presents a general-purpose method for detecting cheating in online courses, which combines anomaly detection and supervised machine learning. Using features that are rooted in psychometrics and learning analytics literature, and capture anomalies in learner behavior and response patterns, we demonstrate that a classifier that is…

Academic misconduct and academic integrity are issues of importance to Higher Education Institutions (HEIs). Phraseologies and practices may conflate unintentional mistakes with attempts to gain illegitimate advantage, with some groups potentially at higher risk. HEIs across the United Kingdom (UK) responded to a Freedom of Information Act (FOI)…

Test takers wishing to gain an unfair advantage often share answers with other test takers, either sharing all answers (a full key) or some (a partial key). Detecting key sharing during a tight testing window requires an efficient, easily interpretable, and rich form of analysis that is descriptive and inferential. We introduce a detection method…

This study explores the capability of academic staff assisted by the Turnitin Artificial Intelligence (AI) detection tool to identify the use of AI-generated content in university assessments. 22 different experimental submissions were produced using Open AI's ChatGPT tool, with prompting techniques used to reduce the likelihood of AI detectors…

Recent approaches to the detection of cheaters in tests employ detectors from the field of machine learning. Detectors based on supervised learning algorithms achieve high accuracy but require labeled data sets with identified cheaters for training. Labeled data sets are usually not available at an early stage of the assessment period. In this…

The pervasive issue of cheating in educational tests has emerged as a paramount concern within the realm of education, prompting scholars to explore diverse methodologies for identifying potential transgressors. While machine learning models have been extensively investigated for this purpose, the untapped potential of TabNet, an intricate deep…

As technologies have been improved, item preknowledge has become a common concern in the test security area. The present study proposes an unsupervised-learning-based approach to detect compromised items. The unsupervised-learning-based compromised item detection approach contains three steps: (1) classify responses of each examinee as either…

As the COVID-19 pandemic motivated a shift to virtual teaching, exams have increasingly moved online too. Detecting cheating through collusion is not easy when tech-savvy students take online exams at home and on their own devices. Such online at-home exams may tempt students to collude and share materials and answers. However, online exams'…

A quick and effective learning assessment is needed to evaluate the learning process. Many tools currently offer automatic assessment for subjective and objective questions; however, there is no such free tool that provides plagiarism detection among students for subjective questions in a learning management system (LMS). This article aims to…

The rise of online proctoring potentially provides more opportunities for item harvesting and consequent brain dumping and shared "study guides" based on stolen content. This has increased the need for rapid approaches for evaluating and acting on suspicious test responses in every delivery modality. Both hiring proxy test takers and…

Randomized response techniques (RRTs) are useful survey tools for estimating the prevalence of sensitive issues, such as the prevalence of doping in elite sports. One type of RRT, the unrelated question model (UQM), has become widely used because of its psychological acceptability for study participants and its favorable statistical properties.…

Item harvesters who memorize, record and share test items can jeopardize the validity and fairness of credentialing tests. Item harvesting behaviors are difficult to detect by the existing statistical modeling approaches due to the absence of operational definitions and the idiosyncratic nature of human behaviors. Motivated to detect the…

Cheating in higher education has numerous negative implications, including degrading program reputations, inflating student retention rates, and cultivating poor ethical practices, all of which have implications for what students do in the workplace after graduation. Therefore, by understanding the current student population, Generation Z, it is…