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The Spring Season breathes new life into the outdoors with blooming wildflowers and budding trees.
It also sucks the life from students and teachers as they further prepare for their Spring Season.
Outdoors, bears begin to awake after months of hibernation.
Indoors, students and teachers WISH they could hibernate.
But why hibernate in the middle of spring? That’s easy – so they do not participate in the unbearable Testing Season.
For these lucky educators, who all year have to “teach” against tests – they now have the thrill of protecting the integrity of those very same tests, and that is no small task.
They need – the unsung heroes of the Testing Season – the proctors. Ah yes, the life of the proctor. Although most have some background in education, proctors come from varied walks of life.
CALL IT AS YOU SEE IT
The proctor’s main task is “to promote fairness by enforcing the designated start and finish times of the exam. A proctor should regulate the examination environment to make sure that the experience is the same for each student.” A bit Pollyanna, I would say. In reality, proctors are tasked to catch cheaters and ne’er-do-wells.
A year of remote learning has spurred an eruption of cheating among students, from grade school to college. With many students isolated at home over the past year—and with a mass of online services at their disposal—academic dishonesty has never been so easy.
Websites allowing students to submit questions for expert answers have gained millions of new users over the past year. A newer breed of site allows students to put up their own class work for auction.
“Consider hiring me to do your assignment,” reads a bid from one auction site. I work fast, pay close attention to the instructions, and deliver a plagiarism-free paper.”
WHERE THERE’S A BUCK THERE’S A WAY
Some educators fear the new generation of cheaters will be loath to stop even after the pandemic recedes. “Students have found a way to cheat and they know it works,” said Thomas Lancaster, senior teaching fellow in computing at Imperial College in London, who has studied academic integrity issues for more than two decades. He said cheating sites number in the thousands, from individuals to large-scale operations.
There is a thin line between students turning to homework help sites that offer study resources and tutorials to better understand a subject, and copying answers found on those sites onto homework and tests or hiring others to do their work.
HONOR AMONG CHEATS
And for sure, students have the right to feel secure that the company they’re hiring to cheat delivers a product for an honest price and honest effort. But that’s not always the case.
This year alone, students have filed a record number of complaints against services with the Better Business Bureau for not getting the grade promised as well as for unoriginal work, late assignments or billing concerns.
Can you imagine something so low as the “cheat firms” not delivering on their promises?
But not all is lost. Online cheating has boosted another industry: surveillance-type companies that hire online proctors to watch students take tests from home.
The proctors look for suspicious behavior, such as a student disappearing from camera view or being slipped answers. Some use facial-detection software to check for wayward eyes and unusual movements. Really? How old school is that?
I WANT THE WESTWORD STUFF
If I’m paying for it, I want AI proctors who can detect all sensitive data, such as PII, which is stored using encryption algorithms no weaker than AES 256. Depending on where data is stored, encryption may be whole disk encryption or encryption applied to the entire database. In addition to the whole-disk/database encryption, sensitive data, such as an exam password, is encrypted at the application layer before being written to the database, which provides a two-layer encryption scheme.
There must be someone who can explain what I would be paying for.
I know, I’ll ask a cheater.
This column is by Ritchie Lucas, Founder of The Student Success Project and Think Factory Consulting. He can be reached at 305-788-4105 or email at ritchie@thinkfactory.com and on Facebook and You Tube as The Student Success Project.
