ProctorFree - This Week in Cheating

Facebook is, in my opinion, my generation’s greatest gift to humanity. It allows us to perform a myriad of social interactions ranging from the ever pleasing casual birthday greeting, to the more clandestine photo stalking.

Facebook even let’s us follow our favorite brands and celebrities, and this cool page.  Facebook allows us to organize our friends and interests with groups. One group causing consternation is known simply as “Cheaters Galore” and high school students are sharing AP test questions, quizzes, and full tests to be dispersed among the members.

The students were pretty clever about it. They made this a secret group, which meant it was invite only. It kept faculty and Goody-Two-Shoes out. Well it did until a similar group was discovered, then the whole scheme fell apart like a house of cards. An interesting narrative is arising out of this story, that being that students feel like they need to cheat to get ahead. One student quoted in the article says,

“People feel like they have to do this because of the pressure put on them to be in the top 10 percent. So, I don’t think people are actually intending to do bad stuff they just want to get ahead.”

The culture of this school, the students, the parents, and the AP classes surely can use an adjustment. It’s heartbreaking to hear how students will quickly abandon their moral integrity to cheat if they believe “everyone is doing it.” If I may level with you, the job of fixing the culture of cheating-to-get-ahead is just outside the scope of ProctorFree’s outstanding technology. What our game-changing software can do is stop students in their tracks well before they have an opportunity to nab these test questions.

Our proctoring suite of offerings is a hodgepodge of tracking mechanisms and algorithms, which allows us to track all kinds of behaviors from how your eye-balls are moving to if you are using a virtual machine, and so much in between it makes my head spin. One key mechanism we use is key logging. We can see which keys are hit when and what it corresponds to. If you are like me, and the previous sentence sounded like Charlie Brown’s teacher, it means we can tell if a user is trying to copy-and-paste, take screen captures, print the screen and more. Is it worth mentioning that not only do we detect and report this computer activity, but we also block it. And we do this the ProctorFree way, meaning no people have to be involved in the process whatsoever. It’s all done automatically, from detecting, to blocking, to reporting.

If this high school had been using ProctorFree the students would never have been able to copy those questions and pasted them into the Facebook group.

You can learn more about the students and the school at this link, or check out the video below. Until next time, friends, this has been This Week in Cheating.