Do you deliver online tests to employees (for compliance,
certification or training purposes) or to students in college or
university courses? If so, might your test-takers be less likely to
cheat if you deliver tests or exams embedded in SharePoint than in
a standalone application? The answer is possibly yes. Read on
to find out more!
A key concept to explain this is the fraud triangle, originally
invented by Donald Cressey, a famed criminologist. He suggested
that for people to conduct fraud, which includes cheating at a
test, they need Motivation, Opportunity and Rationalization.
- Motivation. To cheat at a test, you need
motivation, a reason to do it. Typically this will be because
the test is high stakes - if you fail, there will be penalties.
- Opportunity. To cheat at a test, you also
need opportunity. There are three main kinds of opportunity:
1.Impersonation or identity fraud : where another person logs in
and takes a test for the test-taker. For instance, a manager gets a
secretary to take the test for him/her, or a student gets a
cleverer class-mate to take the test.
2.Content theft : where the questions (and/or answers) are stolen
and given/sold to potential cheaters.
3.Unauthorized aids : where the test-takers get unapproved help to
answer the questions, for instance another person to help, or
access to the Internet or materials they are not supposed to
have.
- Rationalization. Someone who cheats also needs
to be able to rationalize to themselves that what they are doing is
fair - for instance that they think the process is unfair or
because everyone else is doing it or some other mental model. They
need a rationale to convince themselves that what they are doing is
okay to do.
So given this, why might taking a test from SharePoint make it
less likely that people cheat?
The main reason is that in many organizations, you would not
willingly give your SharePoint password to another person. This
might give them access to private or financial information (e.g.
bonus or salary). It might be a serious breach of your
organization's information security policy. Or it might allow them
to take actions as you that could be embarrassing (send emails,
fill in forms etc). So in many organizations, if you use SharePoint
to authenticate test-takers, it might encourage someone to take the
test themselves and so prevent impersonation, which is one of
the main Opportunities for cheating.
Use of SharePoint could also help a little with Rationalization,
as it could be part of a fair testing programme, which will make
people feel less keen to defraud it. SharePoint probably won't help
much with Motivation, nor with other Opportunities such as content
theft or unauthorized aids. If you are interested in learning how
to deal with these, as well as more on the fraud triangle, see Questionmark
CEO Eric Shepherd's excellent blog article
Assessment Security and How To Reduce Fraud.
If your organization culture allows SharePoint password
exchange, then using SharePoint probably won't help exam security.
But if your organization culture is such that people will not
easily give their SharePoint password to someone else, then using
SharePoint as an entry point to online tests and exams could reduce
impersonation and so reduce cheating.
John
Kleeman, Questionmark was a speaker at the European SharePoint Conference 2011. Check out his
speaker presentations by
clicking here>>
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