A fake 'examination answer site' is trying to catch a cheating student



With the pandemic, school lessons are now being held online, and even exams are being taken from home. When this happens, the problem is the act of cheating, which lowers the hurdle because there is no monitoring by others. Technology media The Markup explains the companies that crack down on cheating by students and their problems.

A Network of Fake Test Answer Sites Is Trying to Incriminate Students – The Markup

https://themarkup.org/machine-learning/2022/02/15/a-network-of-fake-test-answer-sites-is-trying-to-incriminate-students

From detecting phones to using decoy sites, Honorlock raises online test surveillance concerns --The Arizona State Press
https://www.statepress.com/article/2022/01/honorlock-lockdown-browser-test-surveillance-concerns-asu

As more and more students steal teachers' eyes and cheat, as education goes online, companies developing businesses to crack down on such students are growing exponentially. Honorlock is one of them, and the company provides educational institutions with software that identifies test takers by photos and detects words such as 'OK Google' and 'Hey Siri' to prevent fraudulent activities. doing.

Curt Wilson, a computer science student at the University of Central Florida, found an interesting feature in the software provided by Honorlock. It's what Honorlock calls 'seed sites,' a so-called honeypot that builds fake websites with useful information for exams, detects students visiting them, and identifies fraudulent activity. It is a function like.

The 'seed site' begins with the teacher creating the exam submitting the exam questions to Honorlock. Honorlock picks up some of the exam questions, changes the word order and wording, and posts them as questions on the website. Search this question by copy and paste, record the IP address of the student who accessed the website, the link clicked, the time spent on the site, etc., and send the information to the teacher side. Students are required to introduce Honorlock's Chrome extension during the exam, making it easier for Honorlock's website to appear higher in search results when searching for a specific question.

When Wilson analyzed Honorlock's software, he found about 10 domains that Honorlock seems to be using. Some of these are still functioning, mainly questions such as 'Which part of the digestive system does chemical digestion begin?' And 'Computer Science' that students who have trouble answering exams may ask. Thousands of links such as 'Glossary' are prepared. However, there is no benefit for students, such as clicking a link will return a 404 error, or pressing the 'Show Answers' button provided below the question will only play a sound effect.

One of the websites prepared by Honorlock as a seed site is as follows.

In which part of the digestive system does chemical digestio… | Grade Pack
https://gradepack.com/in-which-part-of-the-digestive-system-does-chemical-digestion-begin/



As Honorlock argues, 'As students gain access to more electronic devices, it's becoming more and more difficult to maintain'academic integrity',' as unprecedented cheating could increase in the future. Sex is possible. Services such as Honorlock seem to benefit educational institutions, but experts are concerned about privacy and ethical issues.

Honorlock never performs facial recognition or voiceprint recognition, and sells to verify the identity of the examinee only by recognizing the photo. However, in the same service developed by other companies, it is also possible to verify the identity using a webcam. Problems such as 'the recognition accuracy differs depending on the race' that accompanies the technology of face recognition are pointed out for such services .



Also, some services are 'required to keep the webcam on all the time during the test', 'required to show the entire tabletop or room on the webcam before the test', and 'prohibit the camera from being out of sight for a period of time'. In some cases, we have set rules such as 'to prevent cheating.' In some cases, such a mechanism may endanger the examinee, and in 2020, 'Although a water rupture occurred during the law school examination, it could not move from the front of the webcam, and the supervisor was also a human being. I had no choice but to continue taking the exam because it was AI instead of AI . ' After the test, the woman went to the hospital to give birth and took the test on the second day in the hospital room.

Cecilia Panther, an educational ethics expert who studies online exams, points out that the existence of software that tracks cheating itself lowers the hurdles for cheating. Students who are told to use such software may feel that they are not trusted or are implicitly asked to cheat, and the use of the software is backfired. 'There will always be some cheating in the exam, but the cost of current measures is at the expense of the original education,' Panther said.

'For educators, the appeal of software that automatically tracks cheating people is clear, but some experts say,'The problem isn't advancing technology for monitoring students. The point is that we have to rethink how to conduct the test. '

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