A growing wave of distance education options across academia has spawned a crop of companies offering online proctoring services to ensure students taking courses online are held to the same academic standard during testing as those who take tests on campus. This is an broad overview of the current techniques available from these service providers.
Live Proctor services:
These services require a student to schedule their exam time. At the requested time the student connects and shows a photo ID to the remote proctor via their computer’s webcam. The student is asked to show their desk area and the room where they are taking the exam space with their webcam, after which they are prompted by the proctor to take their test. If there is a second monitor in the room students are instructed to turn it off so it can’t be used for crib sheets or notes. In this model the proctor may hold a code to unlock the exam, which they can enter remotely so the student never has the code.
Live Proctors monitor the webcam view and computer screen of the student taking the test, watching for any issues that might be construed at cheating. If they see suspicious behavior the proctor may intervene or record the suspect behavior for later review. A report is generated for the instructor, who may review the video and escalate issues further as needed. Typical cost for a 1 hour live proctored exam in in the range of 15~20 dollars.
Test Recording and Review services:
In this solution, technology is used to record the student and their computer screen space without a live proctor present. Typically a student takes a snapshot of their ID at the beginning of the exam, which is saved and compared against the ID used to set up the account. The student is then asked to show their testing space with a 360 degree sweep of the video camera and a sweep of their desk space. Both these sweeps are recorded and stored, along with the time spent actually taking the test.
The webcam and desktop recordings are evaluated either by human test reviewers who watch the recording at a faster speed looking for patterns that reflect cheating (like looking sideways every minute) or they might be initially reviewed by computer analysis, with suspect behavior flagged for review by a human evaluator. When an incident is suspicious the proctor can escalate that incident for faculty review. The primary advantage of recording services is a slightly cheaper price per test, and an ‘on-demand’ test environment where scheduling a time is basically unnecessary.
Unique alternatives:
One service called voice proctor offers an alternative to the video camera and screen capture review system. In this system a student registers their phone number and records a passage through their computer microphone. This creates a ‘voice print’ of the student that is stored for subsequent tests. The instructor can trigger a call to a student when they complete either a specific question or one of a random set of questions. During this call the student is asked to verbally explain their reason for answering one of these trigger questions in the way they did. This explanation is recorded and compared against the ‘voice print’ to confirm the identity of the student taking the test, and the instructor gets access the verbal exam answers to confirm student mastery of the topic. The benefit of this sort of solution is the lower bandwidth needed to take an online test plus operate a video stream in places where fast internet is unavailable. The other potential benefit is the opportunity to pose oral exam questions in a space where written exams or multiple choice are the norm.
Ultimately these services are quite new and evolving rapidly. With the addition of fingerprint readers to smart phones we will soon be even better prepared to prove the identity of online students, which is great news considering the projected growth of online education.
The information for this post was collected in collaboration with John Muir of ODEE.
Thanks John!