Cited by 102Academic integrity and plagiarismOnline Learning and AnalyticsBenford’s Law and Fraud Detection

Machine learning based approach to exam cheating detection

Open access
Kamalov, Firuz, Sulieman, Hana, Santandreu Calonge, David·2021·PLOS ONE

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic has impelled the majority of schools and universities around the world to switch to remote teaching. One of the greatest challenges in online education is preserving the academic integrity of student assessments. The lack of direct supervision by instructors during final examinations poses a significant risk of academic misconduct. In this paper, we propose a new approach to detecting potential cases of cheating on the final exam using machine learning techniques. We treat the issue of identifying the potential cases of cheating as an outlier detection problem. We use students’ continuous assessment results to identify abnormal scores on the final exam. However, unlike a standard outlier detection task in machine learning, the student assessment data requires us to consider its sequential nature. We address this issue by applying recurrent neural networks together with anomaly detection algorithms. Numerical experiments on a range of datasets show that the proposed method achieves a remarkably high level of accuracy in detecting cases of cheating on the exam. We believe that the proposed method would be an effective tool for academics and administrators interested in preserving the academic integrity of course assessments.

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  • As online education grows increasingly popular, the issues of AI plagiarism and detecting academic misconduct with the use of artificial intelligence have become more pressing.

    “As online education is growing increasingly popular, an environment where the use of chatbots is particularly easy, the issues of (a) AI plagiarism and (b) detecting academic misconduct with the use of artificial intelligence [24,43] have become more pressing [96,97].”

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  1. [28]Ueno, M., & Nagaoka, K. (2002). Learning Log Database and Data Mining system for e-Learning–On-Line Statistical Outlier Detection of irregular learning processes. In Proceedings of the International Conference on Advanced Learning Technologies (pp. 436–438).

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Authors
Kamalov, F., Sulieman, H., & Santandreu Calonge, D.
Affiliations
  • Canadian University of Dubai (AE)
  • American University of Sharjah (AE)
Corresponding author
Kamalov, Firuz
Venue
PLOS ONE
Published
2021-08-04
Volume
16
Issue
8
Pages
e0254340
ISSN
1932-6203 (ISSN-L)
OpenAlex
W3192527065
Cited by
102
References
41
Citations by year
2026: 12 · 2025: 20 · 2024: 26 · 2023: 25 · 2022: 17 · 2021: 2
FWCI
21.88
Type
journal article
Language
en
Open access
Locations
  • PLoS ONE (publishedVersion, cc-by)
  • PubMed Central (publishedVersion, cc-by)
  • PubMed (publishedVersion)
  • RePEc: Research Papers in Economics (submittedVersion)
  • DOAJ (DOAJ: Directory of Open Access Journals) (submittedVersion, cc-by-sa)
Funders
american university of sharjah
Topics
  • Social Sciences › Safety Research › Academic integrity and plagiarism
  • Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Computer Science Applications › Online Learning and Analytics
  • Physical Sciences › Mathematics › Statistics and Probability › Benford’s Law and Fraud Detection
Keywords
exam cheating detection, academic integrity, online examinations, remote teaching, COVID-19 pandemic, outlier detection, anomaly detection, recurrent neural networks, sequential data, student test scores, academic misconduct
MeSH terms
Machine Learning, COVID-19, SARS-CoV-2, Algorithms, Educational Measurement, Fraud, Humans, Lie Detection, Deception, Models, Theoretical, Universities, Education, Distance, Pandemics, Datasets as Topic

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