Professors Use Technology to Fight Student Cheating

A testing center at Penn State uses high-tech surveillance to watch for student cheating.

These software programs have been boons to professors like Rick Lotspeich, who teaches economics at Indiana State University in Terre Haute. Until ISU signed up for Turnitin.com a few years ago, Lotspeich says he often spent hours in the library trying to document suspicions of student plagiarism. Now, he just clicks on his computer. "The electronic revolution cuts both ways. It makes plagiarism a lot easier, and checking a lot easier," he says.

The software isn't perfect, of course. A group of Virginia high schoolers is suing Turnitin.com for allegedly taking their papers for its own profit without compensating them. This group (and other students) also says the software doesn't work well because it sometimes accuses students who use common phrases or repeat something they themselves happened to write or blog about previously. And some students say they can beat the program by simply replacing every third word or so from copied material. Turnitin officials say that while a good paraphrase of someone else's material might squeak through, programmers have fixed most of the commonly exploited flaws. CEO John Barrie says that the company is making fair use of the students' papers. "Institutions that have used Turnitin for five or more years have, on average, experienced an over 80 percent decrease in levels of unoriginal student work," he claims. And that, he says, "is a significant public good."

Anticheating hardware: The Graduate Management Admission Council announced this summer that it will start testing palm-print readers to make sure students who sign up for the GMAT are the ones who actually take the tests. Peg Jobst, senior vice president of the GMAT program, says upgrading from fingerprints to palms will allow their computers to flag anyone whose current name and palm don't match previous records. Earlier programs that matched photos didn't always work, although several years ago they did catch a man who wore a wig and dressed as a woman, Jobst said. "We know that cheaters invest heavily in technology, so we invest more," she says.

In addition, more universities are requiring online students to install equipment and software that will make it nearly impossible to cheat on tests. Troy University in Alabama encourages online students to install on their home computers a $150 anticheating package that includes a 360-degree webcam so that proctors can remotely monitor all sights and sounds in their rooms and software that locks down computers for anything but tests during exams. Other schools, such as UCF and Penn State, are installing test centers in which students sit at video-monitored desks and complete their exams using computers that have been cheat-proofed by blocking all ports and Internet access.

Gavin Keirans, president of Penn State's student government, remembers feeling dismayed the first time he had to sit at one of the school's video-monitored testing computers. "I wasn't too happy.... It was almost out of the world of 1984." But he and most other students now appreciate the way the center rewards those who study. "I think it deters cheating a great deal," Keirans says.

More tech-savvy professors: Barbara Christe, program director of biomedical engineering technology at Indiana University-Purdue University in Indianapolis, says she usually catches three or four students a year with her Web "honey pots." She sets up phony Web pages that specifically answer questions in her homework assignments and tests with blatantly out-of-date or inaccurate information. Because they are tailored for her course material, her sites typically show up first in Google searches. It's easy then for Christe to snag those students who took the bait and simply cut and pasted information. Instead of automatically flunking the guilty students (who are typically freshmen), in most cases she tries to use the incidents as a chance to teach how to correctly vet a source.