Even with only one monitor, it’s possible to read most monitors from an angle outside of the field of view of the attached camera. If you’ve got someone who already knows all the answers, and is willing to effectively take the test for you, that’s a level of cheating that’s very difficult to catch, in person or online.
Again, the picture has to be taken at the start of the exam. Right after the picture is taken, the accomplice comes in, connects the monitor and starts helping. The picture is a static point in time. Like I said, I don’t know what the test proctors thinks that proves.
And yes, I know it says “nobody is allowed in the room” but if a person is cheating, none of those things matter.
??? The webcam will show someone coming into the room and connecting the monitor. “At the start of the exam” doesn’t leave a gap where people can wander around setting up extra equipment.
“If a person is cheating, none of these things matter” applies to all examinations, not just remote ones.
Perhaps we are not thinking of the same things. Right now, I’m sitting at the place where I would be taking a hypothetical online exam. My webcam is on my laptop, facing me. My kitchen is behind me. There is a whole living room that is NOT in the web cam, because it’s on the other side of my laptop. It is not visible in the web cam, at all.
Agreed. The most common scam I know of (and have heard of happening WRT students of teacher acquaintances) is simply having one person pass for another, because for most professional exams the invigilators will never have met the person taking the test. It’s difficult, but not impossible if you’re really, really determined.
But that doesn’t mean in-person exams should be done away with either.
I have the impression from the requirements posted above that the area would need to be arranged differently to normal, so that that wasn’t really possible. It’s onerous on the exam-taker but better than not being able to progress in your career.
For the exam I’m planning to take, the requirements don’t seem to be quite as strict, but that’s because it’s a test where you translate documents from one language to another. The major help with that would usually be online translation sites, and it’s trivially easy to tell if the test taker has gone into another window or tab.
I expect there are ways around that if you care enough, but it’s not the kind of test where anyone would bother with that - you couldn’t use it for a Visa, and if you tried to use it for a job, you’d get found out immediately.
Someone else physically sitting there and “holding up answers” would take so long to communicate the answers to you that you’d fail anyway.
There are some online exams - ones I’ve taken, even - that are far less vigourous, but they don’t have any real professional standing. The more important the exam, the more important the invigilation.
I looked to see if “must be facing a wall” was a requirement, and didn’t see it. Like I suggested, we are probably thinking of different setups of how the computer must be.
In any event, no matter what requirements are levied, a person who is going to cheat will find a way. There’s no way to stop it. When my kids were taking at-home AP exams, they didn’t even try to have any anti-cheating requirements, since the exams are so important, they knew that parents and kids would try anything. I could have just taken the tests for them if I was so inclined (I didn’t). Likewise, my CISSP test is very important in the cybersecurity world, so they don’t even bother with at-home testing. I had to mask up and go to a test center, metal detectors, emptying of pockets and so forth.
Are you allowed to use printed dictionaries and the like when taking this test?
Again, not all exams are the same.
If you are writing for an advanced degree, professional school or anything with significant stakes, it will likely be an in-person exam. However, it might be at a local college or university and not one common spot. And you might be the only person writing that exam in person there.
Yes, we can use printed dictionaries - it’s usual to use dictionaries when actually doing the work.
If you really, really wanted to cheat, maybe you could find whoever sets the translation texts and get it translated very quickly, and just type it up from a fake sheet in your dictionary. But that’d cost more than any benefit you’d ever get from passing this exam.
And if the invigilator happened to look at you and think hmm, something looks odd here… Well, did you bribe all the invigilators too? Did you even know who they were going to be?
Cyber security is different. You would have a much higher quotient of people who could cheat software, or like to think they could so would at least try, or know people who could defeat it.
Also you are possibly, like cops when it comes to real people, more sensitive to the possibility of crime than the average person is, to the point where it sometimes seems more likely than it really is.
When you say software can be got around, it’s totally true, but it takes more money and risk than most people are willing to pay, and most of us don’t even have the contacts to do it at all. You might find them on the “dark web,” but like hell am I ever going on the dark web even to look up the weather forecast.
that’s cool. It just seems like the less important the exam, the more hoops the exam takers have to go through in order to take it from home. For the REALLY important exams, they just don’t offer an at-home test, because they know if the test is that important, the checks can be easily gotten around.
I was startled when the AP exams were just “Log in and complete the exam”. Like I said, I could have just taken them for my kids and nobody (except us) would know. I thought the AP exams would be important enough to implement SOME sort of security.
Did four terms online due to COVID-19. All of the exams were open notes with the only real restriction being not to collaborate with others. I don’t know how this was enforced, if ever. I know one of my instructors basically changed his class to get rid of exams. He was not convinced there was an easy way to do an online exam students wouldn’t cheat on.
None of my classes did this, but I heard that some used third-party proctoring services like ProctorU. From the descriptions I read, seems like you’d have an always-on webcam and the proctor would watch you. Before the test started you had to do a 360 with the camera to show that you didn’t have notes posted behind your screen, and the proctor apparently reserved the right to DQ you if someone else was seen entering the room. Sounded like a hassle and I’m glad I didn’t have to do it.
When I took my FE exam for civil engineering last December, that was still conducted in person. I drove from Corvallis to a testing center in Salem. The center was very adherent to social distancing and sanitation standards. I was actually pretty impressed.
Exams serve a lot of purposes. If you are doing something like qualifying for a very specific skilled profession you are going to be found out if you are not up to it.
But I have seen some terrible examples of highly organised cheating in university exams. There is a subclass of students for which the degree is not a qualification but a passport to the next phase of their career. They have no intention of working in the area but need a degree, any degree. Fir some this gets them permanent residency. Others see it as an entry into a management stream. Others just need it to satisfy their parents. And a few years at uni as a student on their parents support is a pretty nice life.
These people devalue the currency of academic achievement. Just about every mechanism of cheating you might think of I have seen go past.
So managing cheating in an online exam is dependent on the nature of the exam, the students, and what the exam ultimately shows. For some one may always have to accept that there will strong incentives for a subset of students to cheat, and that significant effort may be expended to cheat.
As I wrote earlier in the thread, open book exams are a good start if you can do them. But there remains a lot of scope for cheating.