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New analytics will reveal online cheating patterns

Examity®, a provider of online proctoring and identity verification, announced the launch of examiDATA®, a platform designed to aggregate and analyze information on test performance and academic integrity.

Drawing on information from hundreds of thousands of students at colleges and universities nationwide, examiDATA leverages sophisticated analytics to provide colleges and universities with actionable insights on the test-taking patterns of their students.

In the past decade, the number of students taking college courses online has increased dramatically, reaching nearly 6 million as of 2014. This rapid expansion has led to increased demand for solutions that can ensure the quality and integrity of online programs in higher education.

To help colleges measure their rate of test-taking violations and benchmark against peer institutions, examiDATA breaks out cheating information by key categories including tuition level, type of school, and department of study.

“The explosion of online education has allowed us to make huge strides in supporting a growing population of nontraditional students,” said Dr. Lauren Cifuentes, director of Distance Education and Learning Technologies at Texas A&M. “However, data-driven approaches that shed light on macro trends in online test security remain nascent. The insights surfaced by examiDATA will play a critical role in validating the work of our team and students relative to other institutions.”

An initial pilot of the examiDATA platform, conducted with 325,000 test-takers in the 2015-16 school year, found significant fluctuations in cheating semester-over-semester. While the percentage of students with violations fell from 6.62 percent to 5.49 percent from fall to spring, cheating rates grew to a new high in summer 2016, reaching 6.65 percent.

“From time of year to type of institution, test violations fluctuate in ways that are critical to understand in order to ensure the continued success of online learning – but often remain invisible without the support of predictive analytics,” said Michael London, president and CEO of Examity. “Armed with insights into student performance trends, colleges and universities can use examiDATA to address specific pain points and further improve the security of their online assessments.”

Examity works with a diverse group of leading public and private institutions, including Boston University, Pennsylvania State University, and Yale University, to provide real-time, round-the-clock proctoring services that can be customized to meet the needs of individual institutions and programs.

Examity recently released a mobile platform, examiGO, designed to streamline the authentication process for students and faculty by brining leading-edge mobile technology to bear on ID verification.

Material from a press release was used in this report.