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A study by the researchers behind edX, MITx, and HarvardX has discovered the resourcefulness of massive open online course (MOOC) students in cheating to obtain the certificates offered. From a summary on an MIT page:
In a new working paper, researchers at MIT and Harvard University identify a new method of cheating specific to open online courses and recommend a number of strategies that prove effective in preventing such cheating.
[...] In this method of cheating, a user creates multiple accounts, one of which is the primary account that will ultimately earn a certificate. The other accounts are used to find or "harvest" the correct answers to assessment questions for the master account.
As someone who has taken a few MOOCs to see their potential, I thought this form of cheating would have been obvious from the start. The researchers discovered it when they found some users were answering questions "faster than is humanly possible." The method is referred to as CAMEO–"copying answers using multiple existences online". The magnitude of the problem appears to be small:
The researchers examined data gathered from 1.9 million course participants in 115 MOOCs offered by HarvardX and MITx from the fall of 2012 through the spring of 2015. They discovered that in 69 courses where users were found to have been employing the CAMEO strategy, 1.3 percent of the certificates earned (1,237 certificates) appeared to have been obtained through such cheating. Additionally, they found that among earners of 20 or more certificates, 25 percent appear to have used the CAMEO strategy. In some courses CAMEO users may account for as many as 5 percent of certificates earned.
Who are the major culprits?
CAMEO usage was found to be higher among young, less-educated males outside the United States. The rate among users from the United States was particularly low, at 0.4 percent of certificates earned. The authors observe that these rates may correlate with the perceived value of the certificate across different countries.
The prevalence of CAMEO usage was highest in government, health, and social science courses, where 1.3 percent of certificates were earned by employing the CAMEO strategy, and lowest in computer science courses, where just 0.1 percent of certificates were obtained using the technique.
The paper does suggest methods to prevent this cheating. Unfortunately, some of the prevention methods are difficult to implement in the courses that need them most.
(Score: 2) by githaron on Tuesday August 25 2015, @01:55PM
Aren't most MOOCs submit until correct (or too lazy to correct). I have taken a course on Udacity and Coursera and I never remember having to worry about getting an answer wrong. If I got it wrong I went back and corrected my answer/code.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by VLM on Tuesday August 25 2015, @02:34PM
At least the automata theory class on coursera was lose another 5% every submission attempt, or something like that, and you got to keep your peak historical score rather than most recent score. So if you finally got 100% correct on your third try that would be an 85% net, although if you got one wrong on the first try yielding a 90% then you'd get to keep the 90% peak. There is no standard.
Thats the only course I've ever fully completed and passed. Mostly because I already knew the field pretty well so I didn't study. I started a couple, like the original AI course, the computational neuroscience course, a Scala course, a couple others, but life always intervened after a couple weeks, I'd fall behind, and its all over. There do exist non-scheduled courses which look interesting.
(Score: 1) by eof on Tuesday August 25 2015, @03:24PM
There are all kinds of different models. With some you have only one chance to submit and then your work is either graded by the computer or by your peers. The peer grading can work fairly well, if the instructors have done a good job in preparing the assignment; it can be a disaster otherwise.