Securexam and related tools

April 24, 2005 8:04 PM

Has anyone here successfully challenged the use of securexam or other computer-locking tools on the grounds that your school's honor code already provides sufficient protection against cheating?

I'm graduating in about two weeks, so I really don't care that much, but I'm interested in leaving a parting shot with our administration that mandating the use of Securexam (etc.) actually discourages promotion of the honor code in that it "forces" people not to cheat. I'd like to make a strong policy statement that students, especially law students, should not be presumed to be cheaters and that relying on pre-infraction anti-cheating methods indicates either apathy about cheating or an inability to police actual cheating effectively.

Of course, even Securexam is not particularly secure, and, in my mind, the type of person who is going to cheat is going to find a way around it.

Anyway, I absolutely 100% do not condone cheating, and I believe in a one-strike-and-you're-out policy on cheating. I do 100% support honor codes.

An adjunct question for anyone who does or did attend a school like Washington & Lee that has an extremely strong honor code culture: do your schools use the software?

posted by socratic to education (8 comments total)

My lawschool uses SecureExam. Frankly I'd rather use it than have to write by hand, so I don't care. And yes I think it is necessary because of the temptation to just alt-tab out and bring up notes or pre-typed answers to cut-and-paste. I agree that either people are going to cheat or they aren't, but we don't need to make life super-easy for the cheaters.
posted by falconred at 9:28 PM on April 24, 2005

I'm seconding falconred on this, because I still have to hand write all my exams. You might be known in the not-so-distant future as "that asshole who's responsible for making us hand-write all these exams."
posted by MrZero at 10:12 PM on April 24, 2005

I'm aware of those considerations, and I don't necessarily disagree with them. Most of our faculty give open notes exams anyway.

The one consideration neither of you raised, however, is that laptop students will typically have an advantage over handwriting students (securexam or no) because of the ability to edit text, to reorganize blocks of arguments, and, in most cases, simply to type faster than most folks can write. We still have a significant percentage (fully two-thirds in an exam I took on Friday) who hand-write their exams (and I'll be, without complaint, handwriting one on Wednesday because our school doesn't offer Securexam for the Mac, which is brand new).
posted by socratic at 10:32 PM on April 24, 2005

On the opposite end of this spectrum, I wish our school did have something like this. We have an honor code (Duke) but I've found at least 3 cases already this year, and their final papers aren't even in yet. It has taken up lots of my time this year, proving and battling with students/faculty/administration after both suspect and proven case. I'm not at a law school, but I'm all for whatever tools make it easier to detect the obvious cases. There will always be students who would be able to semi-cheat and get around the software, but for those that it did catch, it would make the process easier as both a TA and teacher of my own courses.
posted by fionab at 11:11 PM on April 24, 2005

My undergrad university (Princeton) had an honor code, and was pretty rigorous about expelling kids for cheating. This was good. The greatest difficulty the honor code generated was that it required students to report other students for cheating. I don't know if that ever happened, and it's certainly a hard choice, but as it seemed to me at the time it was a perfectly reasonable demand. Princeton had a pretty strong honor code culture, e.g., the exams were unproctored and many of them were take-home exams. I didn't personally know anyone who cheated on an exam--although I did know one guy who cheated on economics problem sets and was called on it by his TA.

I'm at Harvard now for graduate school, and there is no honor code here, which means that exams are proctored. It is definitely *not* an improvement.

As for the practice you're describing, it sounds crazy to me that some exams are written by hand while others are typed out. Either every student should write or every student should type--the cost of the system clearly outweighs the benefits.
posted by josh at 4:18 AM on April 25, 2005

My law school was using ExamSoft when I started 3 years ago (which led me to buy a PC over a shiny new iBook). Suposedly, faculty never liked it and we only kept it around because students didn't trust each other. The school said it had raised the issue of changing two years before I was a 1L and got negged. Mid 2L, the SBA passed a resolution in favor of dumping ExamSoft. The license was up for renewal in April, so the school abandoned it immediately to avoid paying another $50k.

Now, we just use Word and WordPefect. The school has a blank exam template we have to use, and before the exam, there are certain settings you have to change, like the spell check and grammar check, etc. And unless the prof specifies otherwise, we have to disable our wireless.

I was strongly in favor of this move. I trust my classmates, to an extent, but I aslo just never cared. Despite the curve, I rarely worry about how others are doing and just bust my ass to write an A paper. I'm not saying I'm above competition or anything, just that if I'm always aiming for the top and I can reach it honestly, I don't need to worry about how/if other people get there. Not that I'm at the very top of the class or anything, but I'm happy where I am. Maybe if I found myself tearing my hair out just to get the bottom score, I'd be less willing to risk giving up any ground. Not sure though.

Besides, the same hypercompetitiveness that makes some people so certain their classmates will cheat is also likely to police that cheating. If I looked up from my screen for a few seconds and saw a web browser or something else that looked fishy on someone's screen, I'd raise hell.

Huge benefits I've seen so far since we switched away from ExamSoft. 1) if I had the means to acquire a powerbook right now, I could use it in exams with no problem. 2) Word aint perfect, but it's more reliable than ExamSoft, and it doesn't require locking anything down. 3) when a floppy drive fails, someone from the registrar just comes in with a USB key and backs up the exam, which they couldn't do with ExamSoft. 4) it's one less thing for non-tech-savvy people to have to learn when they're already stressed about exams.

The hand-writing option is still available, but fewer and fewer people use it every semester.
posted by jewishbuddha at 6:13 AM on April 25, 2005

Derail: You guys get to TYPE exams?

Sheesh, when I was in school, we had to handwrite all the exams. Exam taking was about the only time I had to write anything other than filling out a form. I can remember the cramps today..
posted by By The Grace of God at 11:17 AM on April 25, 2005

Davidson College. Honor Code. Serious shit. I know of two cases personally where the people were innocent of any wrongdoing, and were still convicted under the honor code because it works wrong -- more like guilty until proven innocent, rather than the latter.

That said -- I like the Honor Code. (The two cases above were pretty weird and one involved someone who was being malicious, which you can't really account for very well.) It meant that I got to take exams in a totally unproctored environment; type up any takehomes that I wanted to type rather than fill in by hand; turn in my papers in the middle of the night because it just had to be there "before I get to my office at 9 am;" et cetera. When I was there, and to my knowledge at this time, there is no "Securexam" or anything else at Davidson to prevent cheating. It's huge, it's taken very seriously, and we are very proud of it. Students respect the daylights out of it. Our athletes aren't cheaters, and our Summa Cum Laudes really earn it. I prefer assumption of honesty over assumption of deceit; I guess that's why the corporate world and I get along like two wet cats in a sack.
posted by Medieval Maven at 3:21 PM on April 25, 2005