Caught in the act: high-tech specs thwart exam cheats
▶ Swedish spy glasses offer solution in the battle against cheating in tests
Cheating in exams has gone on for as long as people have been made to sit written tests.
With the ever-advancing pace of technology, breaking the rules with the use of smartphones and earpieces has made the task even easier.
But now new technology could be levelling the playing field – turning the tables by catching exam cheats in the act.
Manufactured by the Swedish company Tobii, a high-tech pair of glasses, which tracks the wearer’s eyes, can pinpoint exactly where a person taking a test is looking.
And if the wearer’s gaze wanders – such as to the desk of a neighbouring student – then their deception will be recorded.
“The glasses record everything you see,” said Professor Justin Thomas, a psychology researcher at Zayed University and a columnist for The National, and one of two academics who reviewed the technology.
“They are also fitted with a sensitive mic. If you see it, we see it; if you hear it, we hear it.”
Recent research carried out by the International Centre for Academic Integrity compiled global surveys of cheating spanning the 12 years from 2002 to 2015, including data for 71,300 undergraduates.
They found 39 per cent of students reported having cheated in an exam, while 64 per cent said they had cheated in a written assignment.
In a study of the effectiveness of Tobii’s glasses, researchers carried out a mock exam that was sat by 30 first-year undergraduates at Zayed University.
Three students acted as cheaters and wore the glasses that made visual and audio recordings at the same time.
When the team reviewed the footage, they identified all 22 instances where the volunteers had attempted to cheat.
“We replayed the exam footage – kind of like Var [video assistant referee] for exams. If we saw foul play, we flagged it,” Prof Thomas said.
“Examples included looking at a phone, looking at cheat sheets or looking at another student’s paper.
“The only way to cheat would be to cover the camera with your finger and then cheat.
“We made a rule that interference with the camera was to be taken as cheating.”
Prof Thomas, who co-wrote the paper with Dr Adam Jeffers, an assistant professor at Zayed University, acknowledged that the technology was currently too expensive to introduce on a large scale.
But he predicted that, given time, the cost of the glasses was likely to reduce quickly, becoming “as cheap as chips in a few years”.
The main challenge to improve the device, he said, was to find an automatic way of reviewing the footage to reduce the man hours it took to check many students.
“We envisage that a machine-learning algorithm could be developed to review the footage at high speed and just flag up anything suspicious,” Prof Thomas said.
“The suspect sections could then be reviewed by traditional proctors who would deem if the student had violated exam integrity.”
Prof Thomas said the glasses were unlikely to lead to false positives, where innocent students end up being accused of cheating.
He said that instead, the technology could protect students from mistaken or unfair allegations.
If the glasses were fitted with retinal scanners, for example, this could confirm that a candidate was who they claimed to be.
Imposters have been known to sit exam papers for a fee, ensuring that their clients passed.
Dr Irene Glendinning, a researcher in academic integrity at Coventry University in the UK, said eye-tracking glasses might be effective against several types of cheating.
She said these included collusion, copying, using crib notes, receiving spoken messages and using a smartphone.
But she said the technology would not be effective against other forms of cheating, such as a student leaving an exam room and accessing materials in a toilet.
Dr Thomas Lancaster, a senior teaching fellow at Imperial College London who has researched issues around academic cheating for two decades, said “no way of trying to stop cheating is infallible”.
“There’s probably more temptation to cheat than there used to be, because we now have a system where people’s lives depend so much on their results,” Dr Lancaster said.
An alternative method tried in some countries, particularly in eastern Europe, is filming students in exams, Dr Glendinning said.
“It’s kind of an arms race,” said Dr Glendinning, referring to the constant battle between new cheating prevention techniques and the ability of students to find different ways to beat the system.
In a statement, Tobii said its glasses were “designed to capture natural viewing behaviour”.
“Wearable mobile eye-tracking systems open up entirely new opportunities for behavioural studies,” it said.
So how does Tobii’s product work?
The glasses contain five miniature cameras and a series of lights or illuminators.
A pair of cameras face towards each eye of the wearer while another lens faces forward, capturing the individual’s surroundings.
The illuminators beam a pattern of light into the wearer’s eyes and four cameras capture images showing these reflections.
The images are used to identify the reflection of the light source on the cornea and a series of calculations can reveal the direction of the wearer’s gaze.
A combination of this gaze point and additional footage from the forward-facing camera identifies what the person is studying at any particular time.