By Megan Zahneis, News Editor
A student walks into a room, ready for her final exam.
She takes a seat and racks her brain, willing herself to recall the minutiae of the course material she'd worked an entire semester to master.
She sits down at her computer, logs in and allows the software installed to access her screen, webcam and microphone.
Before she begins her exam, she'll pick up the laptop and rotate it 360 degrees, offering a full view of her environment via webcam. She may even flash her student ID at the camera to confirm her identity.
All because she's being watched by computers that will analyze her every move as she takes her exam, searching for and detecting signs of academic dishonesty.
This scene may not be unfamiliar to Miami University students for long. Ensuring academic integrity in online test-taking is a new frontier in the world of digital education, and it's an initiative being taken on by Miami's Department of eLearning, the Center for Teaching Excellence, faculty and administrators alike.
A specially convened committee has been piloting a variety of online tools that facilitate online exam proctoring in the hopes of implementing a solution at Miami by the winter. One recent trial composed of Miami students and faculty found that in the same course, the average student grades on a proctored exam were between 15 and 17 points lower than those on a non-proctored one.
"[That] tells you there's a huge need for proctoring software," Assistant Provost of eLearning Beth Rubin said. "If you want to offer online classes and give students the flexibility of taking courses in the winter and the summer, then you have to know that it's as rigorous and the academic integrity is as high as if they're sitting in the classroom."
Currently, Miami faculty have access to select services from Respondus, which disables access to all other applications, as well as copy-paste and screen capture functions, while an exam is in session, and the more robust Monitor, an automated proctoring solution that taps into students' webcams and microphones.
But, Rubin said, instructors have found these solutions lacking.
"[Using] Respondus, the faculty has to look at little pictures and identify if they think they see signs of cheating. And if you have 100 people in your course, you're not going to do that," Rubin explained.
That's why Rubin's helping to marshal the group of approximately 15 instructors who have, for the past two years, been seeking proposals from a handful of third-party proctoring agencies.
Rubin explained that many variables went into determining the committee's guidelines, beginning with the access a testing service requires to students' environments. Can its software, for instance, lock down a user's browser, record screen activity, track eye movements via webcam or surrounding audio activity via microphone?
There have been five systems tested so far -- B Virtual, Examity, Proctorio, Respondus Monitor and Software Secure.
"[Our ideal software is one that's] reasonably inexpensive, that's easy for students and faculty that you can take your exam whenever you want, that doesn't interfere with teaching or learning, that has high levels of reliability and allows flexibility for all the different kinds of exams people give -- which is a big order, which is why it took us two and a half years," Rubin said.
While the committee is aware that the use of online monitoring software comes with privacy and legal concerns, Rubin urged students to adhere to the same standards for online exams as they would in-person ones.
But, Rubin said, that rarely happens.
"You would not believe some of what we have heard students talking about," Rubin said. "We have heard students talking about arranging to cheat in so many ways. We've heard students planning drug deals. We have one famous student who likes to take his exams naked."
Brenda Quaye, Miami's coordinator for academic integrity, said online transgressions are handled the same way as ones that occur during in-person interactions, noting that instructors participating in the trial runs were provided with sample language about proctoring procedures to send to their students.
"Would you come to class in your underwear? Probably not. Would you stand up in the middle of class and say X, Y, Z comment? Maybe, maybe not. And if you did, would there be consequences and what does that mean?" Quaye said. "Some students they don't actually believe they're being videoed or they don't actually believe somebody's going to watch these and they make those types of comments."
Visiting assistant professor of philosophy Scott Clifton, who specializes in ethics, said that any student concerns about privacy could be mitigated by faculty explaining the circumstances ahead of time.
"I think there would be some serious ethical problems if students were not aware that they were being monitored in that way while they were taking the online exam," Clifton said. "But if they were made aware of it, and they knew that they could disengage from it at any time ... I think it's analogous to being in a classroom and taking an exam and having someone proctor the exam in the classroom."
Clifton said that if he's truly concerned about the potential for cheating, he'll simply hold an exam in-person, but acknowledged that not all instructors have that option.
Lynette Hudibergh and Nancy Malay, two Miami instructors who participated in the pilot program, said that proctoring software has been shown to significantly decrease incidences of academic dishonesty -- and, with it, test scores.
Quaye said that while most people think that more academic dishonesty occurs in online courses, professional literature on the subject doesn't necessarily bear out that theory. Of the 459 reported cases of academic dishonesty Quaye handled last year, 30 occurred in a fully online course.
For his part, Clifton just wishes it hadn't come to this.
"Maybe it's something we'll never get away from, but it's just sad that we have this kind of adversarial relationship when it comes to exams, where the professor thinks the student's going to cheat and the student kind of assumes that the professor is taking all these steps to prevent the cheating. Really, that's not what we're trying to accomplish at all in the classroom."