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posted by takyon on Tuesday August 25 2015, @01:41PM   Printer-friendly
from the my-final-form dept.

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.


Original Submission

 
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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 25 2015, @04:31PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 25 2015, @04:31PM (#227662)

    I took a sociology course in university, and they used Moodle for their tests. There was a glitch where if you hit the back button it would show you the correct answers. I ignored the the glitch and took the test fair and square, and came out with a mark around 80%. We got to see all the class marks online without the names and just the student ID #'s, and it had the previous marks as well. So, we had 6 or 7 people whose marks went from 30% to 100%, and then back down to around 35%. I brought it up to the teacher, and I think this was the first time he actually took a look at the marks as a whole. He was not pleased, but I don't think anything came of it.