wetakeyourclass.com

Haven’t seen this company but it should not be surprising. Whatever verification methods we use, students can probably get around if they are willing to offer up their login data (and many younger students do this with all their accounts anyways). Kyle is right that it amounts to outright cheating, but we come across that in the F2F environment and all prohibitions seem even easier to violate online. If we also ask for personal data (street addresses, etc.), students could easily provide that to the company as well.

If this became popular we may have to start checking IP addresses – if a bunch of different discussion posters all come from the same place, that could be a serious problem. But there’s ways around that if the company is shrewd enough. At some point, it seems like a technical solution has to be implemented if you are not doing on location proctored exams – webcams, fingerprint authentication will just be part of the environment. out of necessity.

Quick story: in my early days at LSU – and the early days of large 500 student lecture classes – it was pretty easy to pay someone to take your Intro. to Psych final if you wanted. No one checked IDs and everyone was under the delusion that it just wouldn’t happen, but it did. The biggest obstacle was that most of us didn’t have the money or the nerve to pull it off (and yes, we had a basic sense of honesty). Wetakeyourclass sounds just as simple and for now, money and nerve are probably the primary obstacles.

But we’re already dealing with this issue in our F2F classes so it should be no surprise in the online environment. Many of my Nursing instructors now insist that all purses, coats and Smart phones be checked at the door for final exams due to the ingenious answer schemes that some students have come up with.

Cheers,

-ec

Emory M. Craig

Director of eLearning and Instructional Technologies

The College of New Rochelle

New Rochelle, NY   10805

Charter Oak State College is a 100% online public institution, so we have been struggling with this issue for a long time. We developed a 3 step process for attempting to ensure the student who signs up for the assignment/course/program is who they claim to be.  I like to think of them as a series of hurdles designed to discourage fraud while not discouraging our student body. I have summarized the steps below if anyone wants more detail please let me know.

1.       Initial verification of identity. Checking an ID. When a student initially enrolls and on the first log in to the portal they need to answer a series of questions generated by the Acxiom service. If they fail, they are locked out of the portal and directed to call the Registrar. The Registrar’s office interviews the student and manually administers another Acxiom quiz over the phone. If they fail or their data does not exist in the Acxiom DB they need to provide notarized documentation attesting to their identity.

2.       Pedagogical barriers – Increasing the number of assignments, frequency of assignments, and the overall interaction that need to take place within the course improves learning and makes it more $$ for students to pay someone to take the course on behalf of the student. When we base a large % of a student’s grade on 1 or 2 multiple choice exams we are inviting fraud.

3.       Verification at the point of assessment. We are using Acxiom within our LMS (Bb) prior to a high stakes assessment. Currently we are just looking at pedagogically vulnerable courses.

We are pretty happy with steps 1 & 2.  In my opinion, I would like to see something that would make the verification within the LMS even more secure. Perhaps using two factor authentication (and something you have to something you know) so a student would need to have a security token (a smartphone app or separate device for those without a smartphone). I’m pretty sure a student is not going to send their iphone 5 to the folks at wetakeyourclass.com! If anyone would be interested in co-developing something please let me know.

Eric Zematis

Director of Enterprise Systems

Charter Oak State College

860.515.3770

From: The EDUCAUSE CIO Constituent Group Listserv [mailto:CIO@LISTSERV.EDUCAUSE.EDU] On Behalf Of AJ
Sent: Tuesday, September 18, 2012 8:56 AM
To: CIO@LISTSERV.EDUCAUSE.EDU
Subject: Re: [CIO] wetakeyourclass.com

Thanks Kyle, Julie, and Emory for your response.  I'd love to hear from others as well who have discussed or addressed this issue.

Can a professor see that someone logged in from a different ip address?

Absolutely not, we use 100% untraceable (non set) IP Addresses. No one will know, and its 100% safe.

The site is so brazen about it. I’m amazed. I wonder how they take the courses for the students – does the student provide them with their user id and password or does the student simply pass on what the assignment is and post what they provide? If the student provides them with user id and password, they’re certainly violating acceptable use policy and can be prosecuted on that basis alone (much less violating any academic integrity policy). The hard part is catching them in using such a service. I would think that Turnitin.com might be helpful in catching papers that they’ve used.

Sandie

Sandra L. Miller, Ed.D.

CCUMC President-Elect

Director of Instruction & Research Technology

William Paterson University

300 Pompton Road

Wayne, NJ  07470

973.720.2530

millers@wpunj.edu

P Think before you print

The problem is the professional course takers do not work out of a cube in a big office building. They use Comcast, Time Warner, AT&T and Wifi at Starbucks or the local college campus – in other words they would match the profile of the rest of our students. In fact, now that I think about it, there is a high probability they are our students!

Eric

Eric Zematis

Director of Enterprise Systems

Charter Oak State College

860.515.3770

From: The EDUCAUSE CIO Constituent Group Listserv [mailto:CIO@LISTSERV.EDUCAUSE.EDU] On Behalf Of Jake Holmquist
Sent: Tuesday, September 18, 2012 2:28 PM
To: CIO@LISTSERV.EDUCAUSE.EDU
Subject: Re: [CIO] wetakeyourclass.com

I think that this points out an interesting opportunity.  Wearing my former network admin hat, I would be curious to see if there was an IP (or pool of IPs) where the folks at wetakeyourclass.com submitted papers from.  Maybe not enough to accuse an alleged violator, but perhaps enough to raise suspicion and dig deeper.....

Not surprisingly, a wetakeyourclass.com representative declined to be included in our twice annual, market research study of the U.S., Four Year college student market.

The problem is the professional course takers do not work out of a cube in a big office building. They use Comcast, Time Warner, AT&T and Wifi at Starbucks or the local college campus – in other words they would match the profile of the rest of our students. In fact, now that I think about it, there is a high probability they are our students!

Eric

Eric Zematis

Director of Enterprise Systems

Charter Oak State College

860.515.3770

From: The EDUCAUSE CIO Constituent Group Listserv [mailto:CIO@LISTSERV.EDUCAUSE.EDU] On Behalf Of Jake Holmquist
Sent: Tuesday, September 18, 2012 2:28 PM
To: CIO@LISTSERV.EDUCAUSE.EDU
Subject: Re: [CIO] wetakeyourclass.com

I think that this points out an interesting opportunity.  Wearing my former network admin hat, I would be curious to see if there was an IP (or pool of IPs) where the folks at wetakeyourclass.com submitted papers from.  Maybe not enough to accuse an alleged violator, but perhaps enough to raise suspicion and dig deeper.....

Interesting thread…. Following up on AJ’s comments… in the long run, what impact does this behavior have on the “cheater?” Is the cheater doing this because  he/she can’t pass the course? Or needs an A vs. a C….. even if these people (cheaters) graduate….are there any data on future success of cheaters or does, not learning something matter at all???? And if the latter what does that say about what we are teaching????

Just early morning ruminations!!!

Best,

Rob

Dr. Robert Paterson

Vice President – Information Technology, Planning and Research

Molloy College

Rockville Centre, NY

From: The EDUCAUSE CIO Constituent Group Listserv [mailto:CIO@LISTSERV.EDUCAUSE.EDU] On Behalf Of AJ
Sent: Wednesday, September 19, 2012 9:11 AM
To: CIO@LISTSERV.EDUCAUSE.EDU
Subject: Re: [CIO] wetakeyourclass.com

Yes, I think the concern is exactly that this sort of thing can be done large scale.  The amount of cheating that can go on in a face-to-face environment is limited.  If you're going to "hire" someone to take your PSYC 101 exam, the hired gun can only take one test at a time.  That same hired gun, in an online class, can sit in on - what - 6 classes, 8 - 12?

I suppose it was only a matter of time before a company like that came into being.  The existence of this company reminds me that it is probably useful to identify our customers, products and services. 

It’s normal to think of the individual students as customers, and the service to be facilitation of learning.  Products include the academic transcript and diploma.  Most students want both the service and the products, but some are only interested in the products, and not the service – the target market for wetakeyourclass.com.  Some (very few) are interested in the service but not the product; auditors of classes would fall into this category.  Of course we cannot ignore our other customers – everyone who gives us money, like government and donors.  Also complicating the situation is the fact that the customers can affect the value of the products for other customers – if the institution gets a bad reputation by giving away diplomas to incompetent people, then the value of the diploma falls, even though the learning may be no different.  So we universities need to get in the “arms race” of detecting cheaters, so that we don’t award diplomas to people who don’t know the material.  The same goes for testing services, as Rick Bauer mentions.  We might lose that “arms race” due to these cheater facilitation companies and willing cheaters.  The reason I think we may lose that race is that I’m reminded of how we thought captchas would dramatically reduce the ability for spammers to create e-mail accounts for their misdeeds.  Those captchas are being deciphered by workers around the world, making about 0.1 cents each…

I wonder if we will end up with different levels of learning validation – 1) courses taught with at least some substantial portion in person, where there is a professor willing to vouch for the authenticity of the student, and 2) courses taught with none or little in person interaction, where the professor is not willing to vouch for the authenticity of the student.

What is University of Phoenix doing about this problem?  They probably have the most to lose from companies like wetakeyourclass.com, where if enough students get diplomas without learning, and get hired and do poor work, the university gets a bad reputation and goes out of business.

Maybe I’m blowing it out of proportion, and there are in actuality few people who want diplomas without education, and so those few people won’t ruin a school’s reputation.

Kevin

From: AJ [mailto:keltona@MAIL.MONTCLAIR.EDU]
Sent: Wednesday, September 19, 2012 8:11 AM
Subject: Re: wetakeyourclass.com

Yes, I think the concern is exactly that this sort of thing can be done large scale.  The amount of cheating that can go on in a face-to-face environment is limited.  If you're going to "hire" someone to take your PSYC 101 exam, the hired gun can only take one test at a time.  That same hired gun, in an online class, can sit in on - what - 6 classes, 8 - 12?

Isn’t it possible to do this in face-to-face classes? I hire someone to attend all my classes for all 2 or 4 years of my degree and get a diploma issued in my name. Much more expensive to do but possible. I would be fairly easy to do in a large freshman class with 100-200 students unless someone is checking photo ids for every student who turns in a test.

I suppose it was only a matter of time before a company like that came into being.  The existence of this company reminds me that it is probably useful to identify our customers, products and services. 

It’s normal to think of the individual students as customers, and the service to be facilitation of learning.  Products include the academic transcript and diploma.  Most students want both the service and the products, but some are only interested in the products, and not the service – the target market for wetakeyourclass.com.  Some (very few) are interested in the service but not the product; auditors of classes would fall into this category.  Of course we cannot ignore our other customers – everyone who gives us money, like government and donors.  Also complicating the situation is the fact that the customers can affect the value of the products for other customers – if the institution gets a bad reputation by giving away diplomas to incompetent people, then the value of the diploma falls, even though the learning may be no different.  So we universities need to get in the “arms race” of detecting cheaters, so that we don’t award diplomas to people who don’t know the material.  The same goes for testing services, as Rick Bauer mentions.  We might lose that “arms race” due to these cheater facilitation companies and willing cheaters.  The reason I think we may lose that race is that I’m reminded of how we thought captchas would dramatically reduce the ability for spammers to create e-mail accounts for their misdeeds.  Those captchas are being deciphered by workers around the world, making about 0.1 cents each…

I wonder if we will end up with different levels of learning validation – 1) courses taught with at least some substantial portion in person, where there is a professor willing to vouch for the authenticity of the student, and 2) courses taught with none or little in person interaction, where the professor is not willing to vouch for the authenticity of the student.

What is University of Phoenix doing about this problem?  They probably have the most to lose from companies like wetakeyourclass.com, where if enough students get diplomas without learning, and get hired and do poor work, the university gets a bad reputation and goes out of business.

Maybe I’m blowing it out of proportion, and there are in actuality few people who want diplomas without education, and so those few people won’t ruin a school’s reputation.

Kevin

From: AJ [mailto:keltona@MAIL.MONTCLAIR.EDU]
Sent: Wednesday, September 19, 2012 8:11 AM
Subject: Re: wetakeyourclass.com

Yes, I think the concern is exactly that this sort of thing can be done large scale.  The amount of cheating that can go on in a face-to-face environment is limited.  If you're going to "hire" someone to take your PSYC 101 exam, the hired gun can only take one test at a time.  That same hired gun, in an online class, can sit in on - what - 6 classes, 8 - 12?

There are two categories of cheaters

#1 ID Theft/Fraud – In this scenario the objective is for the individual to steal the identity of another with the goal of stealing federal financial aid dollars. They attend the class as long as needed to get the aid disbursements. The challenge questions like Acxiom provides are very effective for this population because the “student” probably does not know the real person whose identity they have stolen.

http://www.justice.gov/usao/az/press_releases/2012/APR/PR_05042012_Delgadoetal.html

#2 Course Cheating – The student is attempting to navigate their path to a diploma and they resort to cheating. Sharing old exams, buying term papers and paying someone to take your class. As mentioned in previous post this is a problem in the online and traditional classroom. I believe the scope of this problem is much greater – and our institutions have largely accepted a certain amount of cheating in our classrooms. We all have policies against it and we have discipline procedures to deal with it and that is it. When there is a fairly simple way to address cheating we take that step. Think about how quickly we adopted turnitin.com across highered – but how many faculty are using it for all their assignments?

So what is the role of the IT leader to protect our institutions from each of these categories?

Eric

I suppose it was only a matter of time before a company like that came into being.  The existence of this company reminds me that it is probably useful to identify our customers, products and services. 

It’s normal to think of the individual students as customers, and the service to be facilitation of learning.  Products include the academic transcript and diploma.  Most students want both the service and the products, but some are only interested in the products, and not the service – the target market for wetakeyourclass.com.  Some (very few) are interested in the service but not the product; auditors of classes would fall into this category.  Of course we cannot ignore our other customers – everyone who gives us money, like government and donors.  Also complicating the situation is the fact that the customers can affect the value of the products for other customers – if the institution gets a bad reputation by giving away diplomas to incompetent people, then the value of the diploma falls, even though the learning may be no different.  So we universities need to get in the “arms race” of detecting cheaters, so that we don’t award diplomas to people who don’t know the material.  The same goes for testing services, as Rick Bauer mentions.  We might lose that “arms race” due to these cheater facilitation companies and willing cheaters.  The reason I think we may lose that race is that I’m reminded of how we thought captchas would dramatically reduce the ability for spammers to create e-mail accounts for their misdeeds.  Those captchas are being deciphered by workers around the world, making about 0.1 cents each…

I wonder if we will end up with different levels of learning validation – 1) courses taught with at least some substantial portion in person, where there is a professor willing to vouch for the authenticity of the student, and 2) courses taught with none or little in person interaction, where the professor is not willing to vouch for the authenticity of the student.

What is University of Phoenix doing about this problem?  They probably have the most to lose from companies like wetakeyourclass.com, where if enough students get diplomas without learning, and get hired and do poor work, the university gets a bad reputation and goes out of business.

Maybe I’m blowing it out of proportion, and there are in actuality few people who want diplomas without education, and so those few people won’t ruin a school’s reputation.

Kevin

From: AJ [mailto:keltona@MAIL.MONTCLAIR.EDU]
Sent: Wednesday, September 19, 2012 8:11 AM
Subject: Re: wetakeyourclass.com

Yes, I think the concern is exactly that this sort of thing can be done large scale.  The amount of cheating that can go on in a face-to-face environment is limited.  If you're going to "hire" someone to take your PSYC 101 exam, the hired gun can only take one test at a time.  That same hired gun, in an online class, can sit in on - what - 6 classes, 8 - 12?

FYI: There was a segment on this morning’s NBC Today Show on college cheating:

http://today.msnbc.msn.com/id/26184891/vp/49100383#49100383

There are two categories of cheaters

#1 ID Theft/Fraud – In this scenario the objective is for the individual to steal the identity of another with the goal of stealing federal financial aid dollars. They attend the class as long as needed to get the aid disbursements. The challenge questions like Acxiom provides are very effective for this population because the “student” probably does not know the real person whose identity they have stolen.

http://www.justice.gov/usao/az/press_releases/2012/APR/PR_05042012_Delgadoetal.html

#2 Course Cheating – The student is attempting to navigate their path to a diploma and they resort to cheating. Sharing old exams, buying term papers and paying someone to take your class. As mentioned in previous post this is a problem in the online and traditional classroom. I believe the scope of this problem is much greater – and our institutions have largely accepted a certain amount of cheating in our classrooms. We all have policies against it and we have discipline procedures to deal with it and that is it. When there is a fairly simple way to address cheating we take that step. Think about how quickly we adopted turnitin.com across highered – but how many faculty are using it for all their assignments?

So what is the role of the IT leader to protect our institutions from each of these categories?

Eric

I suppose it was only a matter of time before a company like that came into being.  The existence of this company reminds me that it is probably useful to identify our customers, products and services. 

It’s normal to think of the individual students as customers, and the service to be facilitation of learning.  Products include the academic transcript and diploma.  Most students want both the service and the products, but some are only interested in the products, and not the service – the target market for wetakeyourclass.com.  Some (very few) are interested in the service but not the product; auditors of classes would fall into this category.  Of course we cannot ignore our other customers – everyone who gives us money, like government and donors.  Also complicating the situation is the fact that the customers can affect the value of the products for other customers – if the institution gets a bad reputation by giving away diplomas to incompetent people, then the value of the diploma falls, even though the learning may be no different.  So we universities need to get in the “arms race” of detecting cheaters, so that we don’t award diplomas to people who don’t know the material.  The same goes for testing services, as Rick Bauer mentions.  We might lose that “arms race” due to these cheater facilitation companies and willing cheaters.  The reason I think we may lose that race is that I’m reminded of how we thought captchas would dramatically reduce the ability for spammers to create e-mail accounts for their misdeeds.  Those captchas are being deciphered by workers around the world, making about 0.1 cents each…

I wonder if we will end up with different levels of learning validation – 1) courses taught with at least some substantial portion in person, where there is a professor willing to vouch for the authenticity of the student, and 2) courses taught with none or little in person interaction, where the professor is not willing to vouch for the authenticity of the student.

What is University of Phoenix doing about this problem?  They probably have the most to lose from companies like wetakeyourclass.com, where if enough students get diplomas without learning, and get hired and do poor work, the university gets a bad reputation and goes out of business.

Maybe I’m blowing it out of proportion, and there are in actuality few people who want diplomas without education, and so those few people won’t ruin a school’s reputation.

Kevin

From: AJ [mailto:keltona@MAIL.MONTCLAIR.EDU]
Sent: Wednesday, September 19, 2012 8:11 AM
Subject: Re: wetakeyourclass.com

Yes, I think the concern is exactly that this sort of thing can be done large scale.  The amount of cheating that can go on in a face-to-face environment is limited.  If you're going to "hire" someone to take your PSYC 101 exam, the hired gun can only take one test at a time.  That same hired gun, in an online class, can sit in on - what - 6 classes, 8 - 12?

Ken,

The mission of Charter Oak State College is to help adult students complete their degrees. One of the biggest barriers to completion is financing, therefore, we keep our expenditures down as low as possible in order to keep tuition/fees low. When we do anything done with an eye towards reducing costs and delivering value. I ball parked the cost below so you can get an idea. You can contact me off-list if you want more details. I’d be glad to help.

#1 Integrating the Acxiom system to deliver challenge questions when students are in the onboarding process involved some custom development which could be done in-house or third party. We used our SIS vendor development and they leveraged some of their existing portal functionality and the Acxiom API. COST under 5k and 1-2 dollars per new student and the Registrar staff time to deal with a couple of students a week who fail to verify through the portal.

#2 Pedagogical approaches to reduce cheating. This takes a lot of time (ID staff and faculty for redesign and faculty who need to interact with students more and not rely on multiple choice tests) but it improves our instruction so the cost is attributed to improving instruction not preventing cheating. COST none.

#3 On going identity check within the LMS – Before high stakes assessment challenge questions can be issued. We use Bb and there is a building block already in place. You choose the exams you want to use the challenge questions on and the % of students who will be challenged (for example, a random 25% of the students who take this assessment will see the challenge questions before their test). COST 1-2 dollars per challenge and Registrar staff time to deal with failures.

Eric Zematis

Director of Enterprise Systems

Charter Oak State College

860.515.3770

From: The EDUCAUSE CIO Constituent Group Listserv [mailto:CIO@LISTSERV.EDUCAUSE.EDU] On Behalf Of Clipperton, Ken
Sent: Friday, September 21, 2012 8:20 AM
To: CIO@LISTSERV.EDUCAUSE.EDU
Subject: Re: [CIO] wetakeyourclass.com

It looks to me like Charter Oak State College has implemented a very good approach.  It might be useful to the rest of us to know roughly how much these measures cost to get set up and what kind of ongoing costs you are incurring. 

While the IT Director at Midland University I explored a range of alternatives to address this concern.  The most interesting technical solution we looked at was a product called Remote Proctor from Software Secure--the same people who make the Securexam software.  From their site-- "Remote Proctor Pro is a hardware device that uses biometrics to authenticate the identity of the test-taker, records all sound, and videos a 360-degree view of the exam environment."  As I recall, the software automatically tagged recordings when possible indicators of cheating occurred.  A service component was available where the company staff would review those tagged recordings and then pass suspicious incidents on to the institution.    

We ultimately stepped back from growing the program that had us looking at the time, but it seemed like a pretty good (though relatively high cost) approach that preserves student convenience compared to having to drive to a proctored exam site.  If we had proceeded, it seemed to me that a critical step beyond the control of the Remote Proctor system would be to make sure we had done a good job of initial verification of identity as described by Eric.  We were going to require at least a couple days on campus at the start of the program and would have done the ID verification, distributed the devices and done a technology orientation as part of that on-campus experience.

We haven't heard from any adopters of the Remote Proctor technology on this thread.  Anyone who is using this technology care to comment about their experience?

Ken Clipperton
Former Director of IT at Midland University
(I am doing some IT consulting for MidlandU while they search for my replacement.)