Towards Fair Assessments: A Machine Learning-based Approach for Detecting Cheating in Online Assessments

Academic cheating poses a significant challenge to conducting fair online assessments. One common way is collusion, where students unethically share answers during the assessment. While several researchers proposed solutions, there is lack of clarity regarding the specific types they target among the different types of collusion. Researchers have used statistical techniques to analyze basic attributes collected by the platforms, for collusion detection. Only few works have used machine learning, considering two or three attributes only; the use of limited features leading to reduced accuracy and increased risk of false accusations. In this work, we focus on In-Parallel Collusion, where students simultaneously work together on an assessment. For data collection, a quiz tool is improvised to capture clickstream data at a finer level of granularity. We use feature engineering to derive seven features and create a machine learning model for collusion detection. The results show: 1) Random Forest exhibits the best accuracy (98.8%), and 2) In contrast to less features as used in earlier works, the full feature set provides the best result; showing that considering multiple facets of similarity enhance the model accuracy. The findings provide platform designers and teachers with insights into optimizing quiz platforms and creating cheat-proof assessments.