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By John Gerritsen of 

Some university departments are reverting to pen and paper for their end-of-year exams because of the difficulty securing digital exams from cheats.

Auckland University computer science senior lecturer Dr Ulrich Speidel says universities are generally not doing enough to ensure online exams were secure.

He says he has detected students running two computers on one machine to evade automated proctoring, smuggling questions to outside helpers, or sitting in exam rooms while someone outside or even in another country did their exam for them.

“We’ve seen all of these techniques used in the wild to cheat,” he said.

Speidel estimated 40-50% of his classes would cheat if he left “all doors open”, and the percentage steadily decreased as he imposed measures such as holding exams on campus and using “flight-mode” internet connections in computer laboratories.

“If they then start to realise that we do actually prosecute people who we see logging in from outside the laboratory, then again word gets round and numbers go down a little bit and in the end you end up maybe with a couple of people who will still try it in a large class, but it’s no longer the sort of significant double-digit percentages that you’d otherwise see,” he said.

He said universities were not taking the problem seriously enough.

“I think that’s actually a sector-wide problem. Partly I think that’s come out of a simple lack of awareness that this is possible.

“There’s always that one application on a complex system that gets installed that gets a way that you haven’t thought of that provides a way in and out.”

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Speidel said even secure Wi-Fi connections and “proctoring” systems – which used students’ webcams to monitor their movements during online exams – could be hacked or circumvented.

He said running a totally watertight digital exam was so hard, it was not worth the effort.

“What I’d like to really see changed is return to pen and paper as much as possible under invigilation. That’s a mode that’s pretty much still working and still working well and has served us well for many, many centuries,” he said.

Professor Stephen Marshall, the director of Victoria University’s Centre for Academic Development, said the advent of online exams and ChatGPT had resulted in an increase in misconduct, although it was hard to gauge how much.

“People have often badly underestimated how much cheating or misconduct has been occurring historically. The literature over the last 30 or 40 years talks of levels of misconduct across all of the assessments we do at university running at somewhere between 10 and 20% of all assessments. So it’s much higher than people think it is as a baseline,” he said.

Marshall said the technical requirements for securing digital exams were so high, many departments did not bother with them.

“Increasingly what we’re seeing is people requiring students to be on premise and doing that in print with pen and paper because the minute you bring any technology into the space, the threshold of support we need, the necessity to put in quite expensive tools and systems to wrap around it so that we’re controlling that environment it’s problematic to deliver that.”

Marshall described automated proctoring, which used the cameras on students’ computers to monitor them while they sat online exams, as “brittle” and “creepy”, and with a very few exceptions, Victoria did not use it.

He said automated proctoring had to function on a wide variety of computers of different ages with different operating systems and on top of that the systems created tension for already-stressed students.

If something went wrong, that stress would increase even further, he said.

“The technology you need to deploy on to their device is incredibly invasive ... technically quite difficult to put into place.

“Technically they are quite likely to fail so the probability as you multiply that out against a large number of students that some of them are going to have a situation that interferes with their ability to take the test gets quite high.”

Marshall said some faculties no longer used exams at all, while others offered 24-hour take-home online tests.

“The use of the big end-of-course test is already in decline and has been for some time,” he said.

He said exams at Victoria this year looked more like the exams of six or seven years ago – before the pandemic brought a boom in the use of online exams.

Massey University said it was still considering and working on recommendations from an independent review of the failure earlier this year of its online supervised exams.

It said online supervised exams (OSEs) would not be used in Massey’s end-of-year exams or Summer School.

“An existing academic working group is also considering the longer-term future of examinations, and we are currently working through assessment options for Semester One 2025 and beyond.”