If there's a buck to be made...
Here's a company that wants to catch cheaters on exams
using statistics...and their own "proprietary methods".
NY Times
By TRIP GABRIEL
Published: December 27, 2010
Cheaters Find an Adversary in Technology
Quote:
Mississippi had a problem born of the age of soaring student testing and digital technology.
High school students taking the state’s end-of-year exams were using cellphones to text one another the answers.
<snip>
So the state called in a company that turns technology against the cheats:
it analyzes answer sheets by computer and flags those
with so many of the same questions wrong or right
that the chances of random agreement are astronomically small.
Copying is the almost certain explanation.
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Quote:
When the anomalies are highly unlikely
— their random occurrence, for example is less than one in one million —
Caveon flags the tests for further investigation by school administrators.
<snip>
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But there's at least one sane voice in the article
Quote:
“You just don’t know the accuracy of the methods
and the extent they may yield false positives or false negatives,” said Dr. Haney,
who in the 1990s pushed the Educational Testing Service, the developer of the SAT,
to submit its own formulas for identifying cheats to an external review board.
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