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…

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'…

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.…

Undergraduate first-year courses are often mandatory for students in a variety of majors and degrees. Many students view these core courses as of little interest and relevance, which is associated with lack of motivation for study and can lead to cheating. Contract cheating in text-based is difficult to detect and prove. Contract cheating in…

A potential negative consequence of high-stakes testing is inappropriate test behaviour involving individuals and/or institutions. Inappropriate test behaviour and test collusion can result in aberrant response patterns and anomalous test scores and invalidate the intended interpretation and use of test results. A variety of statistical techniques…

With the perceived increase in plagiarism in post-secondary institutions, there has been a simultaneous increase in research and analysis on the issue emerging from multiple fields including education, humanities, social science, business and management, sciences, and the media. The focus of this research ranges from the frequency of cases,…

Aim/Purpose: This paper presents some of the issues that academia faces in both the detection of plagiarism and the aftermath. The focus is on the latter, how academics and educational institutions around the world can address the challenges that "follow" the identification of an incident. The scope is to identify the need for and…

Academic integrity is a critical issue in online courses, where students are removed from their instructors in time and space. This article presents a model describing the steps that academic leaders and administrators should follow to implement systems that support academic integrity in online courses. Rather than identifying vendors, which…

Protection of academic integrity in online environments can be challenging. Understanding how the technology works and concerns about each of the methods for monitoring online interactions can assist in the selection of the best proctoring tools. Depending on the content, the type of assessment and the comfort level with the technology, a…

Academic misconduct is a serious, pervasive, communication phenomenon on college campuses. In this study, the goals-plans-action model (Dillard, 1990) was used as a theoretical framework to investigate peer confrontation of cheating and whistle-blowing to a course instructor. In an experiment, participants were asked to respond to measures of…

This article discusses the implementation this year of the Department of Education's Higher Education Opportunity Act of 2008 (HEOA), which requires accreditors to ensure that an institution that offers distance or correspondence education has a process in place to establish that a student who registers in a course or program is also the same…

A statistical test for the detection of answer copying on multiple-choice tests is presented. The test is based on the idea that answers of examinees to test items may be the results of three possible processes: (1) knowing; (2) guessing; and (3) copying. Examinees who do not have access to the answers of other examinees can arrive at their…

Introduces a new Item Response Theory (IRT) based statistic for detecting answer copying. Compares this omega statistic with the best classical test theory-based statistic under various conditions, and finds omega superior based on Type I error rate and power. (SLD)

Issues in effective diagnosis of such dishonest behavior as cheating, lying, and nonconfrontative stealing are discussed. Published intervention approaches for dishonest behavior are reviewed, including negative sanctions, direct appeals to morality, public affirmation, covert sensitization, timeout, reinforcement contingency procedures, and…