The Cheating Scandal

Whether they are taking important school exams, or certification or licensing exams, exam takes are subjected to, sometimes onerous, security procedures. Such exams involve high stakes for both the students or exam taker, and exam administrators.

Boca Raton, FL (prHWY.com) January 30, 2012 - Whether they are taking important school exams, or certification or licensing exams, exam takes are subjected to, sometimes onerous, security procedures. Such exams, known as high stakes exams, involve high stakes for both the students or exam takers, and the exam administrators. Exam administrators worry about the integrity and validity of the exam, so they can offer their exam takers a fair and level playing field. They are also concerned with making sure the content of their exams (i.e. the questions) does not get out into the general public without proper authorization. When this happens, it costs administrators time and money to resolve. Questions have to be retired and replaced (which can be very costly), and sometimes exam results have to be reevaluated.

With all of this focus on exam security, it begs the question of how frequently exam security is breached and how prevalent security vulnerability is. Unfortunately, cheating is far more common than anyone would like to believe. Here are the statistics compiled under Academic Dishonesty within Wikipedia: Academic dishonesty is endemic in all levels of education. In the United States, studies show that 20% of students started cheating in the first grade. Similarly, other studies reveal that currently in the U.S., 56% of middle school students and 70% of high school students have cheated. Students are not the only ones to cheat in an academic setting. A study among North Carolina school teachers found that some 35 percent of respondents said they had witnessed their colleagues cheating in one form or another. The rise of high-stakes testing and the consequences of the results on the teacher is cited as a reason why a teacher might want to inflate the results of their students. The first scholarly studies in the 1960s of academic dishonesty in higher education found that nationally in the U.S., somewhere between 50%-70% of college students had cheated at least once. While nationally, these rates of cheating in the U.S. remain stable today, there are large disparities between different schools, depending on the size, selectivity, and anti-cheating policies of the school. Generally, the smaller and more selective the college, the less cheating occurs there. For instance, the number of students who have engaged in academic dishonesty at small elite liberal arts collegescan be as low as 15%-20%, while cheating at large public universities can be as high as 75%. Moreover, researchers have found that students who attend a school with an honor code are less likely to cheat than students at schools with other ways of enforcing academic integrity. As for graduate education, a recent study found that 56% of MBA students admitted cheating, along with 54% of graduate students in engineering, 48% in education, and 45% in law.

Moreover, there are online services that offer to prepare any kind of homework of high school and college level and take online tests for students. While administrators are often aware of such websites, they have been unsuccessful in curbing cheating in homework and non-proctored online tests, resorting to a recommendation by the Ohio Mathematics Association to derive at least 80% of the grade of online classes from proctored tests. While research on academic dishonesty in other countries is minimal, anecdotal evidence suggests cheating could be even more common in countries like Japan. A typology of academic misconduct has been devised by Perry (2010). Perry's typology presents a two dimensional model of academic misconduct with one dimension measuring the degree to which rules are understood and the other dimension measuring how closely these rules are followed. According to the typology only those students who understand the rules but fail to adhere to the rules are classified as 'cheats'.

Information provided by ExamSoft and Wikipedia

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Tag Words: examsoft security breach, examsoft cheating

Categories: Computers

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