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The Danish Ministry of Education has developed a "digital exam invigilator" to be used by students in the equivalent of high schools ("gymnasiale uddannelser"). The purpose is to be able to detect cheating during written exams. The program:
- captures all keystrokes (keylogger)
- captures a screenshot every minute and whenever you switch tasks
- a list of all open webpages
- network configuration
- which programs are running
- whether it's is running in a VM
- contents of the clipboard
and sends this to a central server during the exam. The data is kept for 4 months.
The initiative is getting a lot of criticism.
- In 2017 there was 229 suspicions of cheating out of more than 200.000 students, so this initiative may be out of proportions.
- The program is only available for Windows and MacOS. No support for Linux or ChromeOS.
- It may be possible for a 3rd party to do a MITM-attack and take over the students' PCs.
- If a student is unable or unwilling to install the program he can perform the exam under "extended surveillance" (good old-fashioned humans watching) at the school's discretion. Some schools deny students this option and instead just fail them.
- The program will likely collect private information.
The schools do not provide computers for students because they cannot afford it. So its BYOD. On some schools (eg. some vocational schools) Linux is quite common. Some schools have trouble affording the extra human invigilators.
So soylentils: what would you do given the constraints? What do other countries do? Ignore the risk of cheating? Spend money on human invigilators?
All sources are in Danish as this news has not hit the international scene (yet). Sorry.
Danish Ministry of Education page on the program: https://www.stil.dk/uvm-dk/gymnasiale-uddannelser/proever-og-eksamen/netproever/den-digitale-proevevagt
Short analysis by security expert Peter Kruse: https://www.dr.dk/nyheder/indland/den-digitale-proevevagt-overvaagnings-kritiske-elever-faar-ministeriet-til-rette
A Reddit thread on the subject: https://www.reddit.com/r/Denmark/comments/avovqx/staten_har_nu_krav_om_at_vi_installerer_et/
A discussion on version2 (an EE and CS site): https://www.version2.dk/artikel/digitale-proevevagt-totalovervaagning-elevers-computere-midlertidigt-trukket-tilbage-1087609
(Score: 4, Interesting) by bradley13 on Wednesday March 06 2019, @05:50AM (3 children)
Cheating, exams, ah, the tales... It is a serious problem, and internationalization doesn't help: some cultures really don't seem to see the problem. In one extreme case, I had a student ask me why I didn't distribute the answers ahead of time, like he was used to from home.
I teach programming exams, and I would immensely prefer to have students, you know, actually write programs. Solving programming problems on papers is just stupid. Years ago, I would just do this - and leave wireshark running to encourage honesty - but really, it was an honor system.
That doesn't work anymore. More and more people are going into IT, and I frankly can no longer trust my classes to contain zero cheaters. In the grading conference this week, it was literally a question: how do you catch the students who are paying someone in Eastern Europe to do all their work? Even at exams, we can check IDs, but - given large classes and bad pictures - one is still not always sure: "is this really the student, just having a bad-hair day?"
I've used a locked down Linux image that the students boot their own computers from. The Linux image is great, but you'd be amazed how many computers are incapable of booting from it (Microsoft Surface, for example). Also, if you're going this direction, then the students need to be able to bring their online references with - on another USB, and some computers have only the one USB plug. It's not as easy as it ought to be.
We have computer labs, where we can provide the computers, but that's has it's own limitation: the labs are small, because no one ever uses them - everyone has their own machine. So classes would have to take the exam in shifts, um...also not great.
Dunno what the long-term solution is, but we surely haven't found it yet. I'm giving this year's exams on paper, again...
Everyone is somebody else's weirdo.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 06 2019, @10:24AM
Actually you have:
There's absolutely no need that exams are done on a computer.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 06 2019, @01:37PM
I've had programming exams and also made one. All open book, on a school provided computer, but that wouldn't matter.
When the student finished the tasks you go sit beside them, look over the work together and ask some questions.
A. Some questions on the task to make sure you understand what he/she was trying to do so you can properly grade. (Make some notes that you can use afterwards when you're reviewing their code)
B. Additional follow up questions around the task to see if they also understand why they were doing some things. This also helps to refine grading further.
C. Some small quick questions on things that are in the curriculum but weren't on the test. To refine your grade even further.
If they used a East-European cheat partner, they will fail miserably at answering your questions.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 06 2019, @02:05PM
I guess it depends on what the problem is. Having answers is great to verify if you are doing things correctly.