New Industry Sprouts to Curb Hacking, Wireless Transmission of Exam Questions
By CAMERON MCWHIRTER
As computer-based testing becomes more common across the country, cheaters and those trying to prevent it are going high-tech.
Enlarge Image
Michael Rubenstein for The Wall Street Journal
John Fremer's Caveon Test Security is one of the U.S.'s biggest firms specializing in combating test cheaters.
Fighting test cheating is an age-old battle, as shown by recent major scandals involving pencil-and-paper exams. But worries about hacking and other sophisticated forms of cheating, such as wirelessly transmitting questions outside of an exam room, has testing companies, test-security firms and academics rushing to develop measures to reduce or catch cheating. Companies plan to soon start selling security packages to school districts and licensing boards.
Security "is heavy on our minds," said spokesman Ed Colby for ACT, the nonprofit that administers a national college-placement exam that was taken by about 1.7 million of last year's high-school graduates. Mr. Colby said ACT plans to offer computer-based testing, in which questions are answered on computer terminals, for hundreds of thousands of students beginning in 2015.
Academic research into fighting high-tech test cheating has exploded, with national conferences, a new anticheating handbook and a flood of scholarly papers on the subject. "Even five years ago, almost none of this existed," said James Wollack, a University of Wisconsin educational psychology professor and co-editor of a new handbook on test security. "As a field, it's expanding exponentially."
The new methods are meant to combat acts such as "question harvesting," in which test takers use advanced technology to download questions or capture their images with digital cameras or other devices while taking a test, then transmit them wirelessly outside of a testing room. These questions then can end up for sale on Internet sites.
While stealing tests and answers isn't new, testing companies worry the digital and wireless age have made stealing vast amounts of information quickly much easier.
More high-tech forms of cheating are a far cry from recent scandals, such as one in Atlanta in which the city school district's former superintendent and 34 other educators face state felony charges that they conspired to erase students' wrong answers on paper tests, then cover it up.
Enlarge Image
"We've had cheating for literally thousands of years," said John Fremer, a co-founder of Caveon Test Security, one of the nation's largest companies specializing in preventing and detecting test cheating. "So to have the notion that now it's going to be different isn't plausible."
Major testing companies like CTB/McGraw-Hill MHFI +0.29% and the Graduate Management Admissions Council are developing security packages to sell to schools and licensing boards. Test-security firms such as Caveon, of Midvale, Utah, are quickly adding products to combat cheating on computer-based tests.
While most big testing firms allow paper-and-pencil exams as an option, computer-based exams are spreading because "it allows us to meet students in the world they live in now," said Mr. Colby of ACT, which is based in Iowa City, Iowa.
Cheat-busting technology being developed includes adaptive testing, where questions are different for each student, so "the test is no longer a fixed form," said Wim van der Linden, chief research scientist for CTB/McGraw-Hill. The Monterey, Calif., firm is planning to launch products to sell to testers by late this year or early next year, Mr. van der Linden said.
The Graduate Management Admissions Council, of Reston, Va., has developed technology that includes ways to analyze test responses for irregularities, such as everyone in a certain class giving the same answer in the same amount of time, according to Lawrence Rudner, who heads up the council's efforts to design tests that are fair, accurate and not susceptible to cheating.
Wireless technology is another threat, Mr. van der Linden said, because it allows cheaters to reach people outside the classroom during a test. Most computer-based tests are conducted on systems that block Internet access during the exam.
Mr. van der Linden said a person recently taking a driver's license test outside the U.S. used a tiny video camera in his glasses to transmit questions wirelessly to a person outside the test room, who then relayed correct answers via a small earpiece.
For now, test givers believe computers give them the advantage. Neal Kingston, director of the University of Kansas' Center for Educational Testing and Evaluation, said computer-based testing allows the test-givers to see abnormal patterns in test answers, and in some cases allows then to see problems as the tests are being taken in real-time.
But some educators prefer pencil-and-paper exams. Computers are prone to hacking and other security breaches, making cheating on standardized tests more likely, not less, said Jesse Hagopian, a history teacher at Garfield High School in Seattle, where faculty have generally opposed standardized tests.
"The idea that [computers] would be the solution to cheating doesn't make sense to me on the face of it," he said.
