2/24/2013

Web Classes Grapple With Stopping Cheats

Traditional colleges and a new breed of online-education providers, trying to figure out how to profit from the rising popularity of massive open online courses, are pouring resources into efforts to solve a problem that has bedeviled teachers for centuries: How can students be stopped from cheating?

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Close David Walter Banks for The Wall Street Journal

Satia Renee, a 50-year-old from Smyrna, Ga., sees incidences of cheating as a byproduct of course design.

Coursera, a Silicon Valley-based MOOC, recently launched a keystroke system to recognize individual students' typing patterns. EdX, its East Coast rival, is employing palm-vein scans. Other strategies include honor codes, remote web-camera proctors and test-taking centers.

Until recently, MOOCs have offered only certificates of completion that in some cases come with a letter grade. Typically, papers have been assessed by fellow students and tests marked by computers. Students frequently study together in online chat rooms�and there is often little to prevent them from cheating on tests or papers.

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