ON CAMPUS
campusreview.com.au
Could you go into a bit more depth about
how this would verify students’ identity?
From what you’ve said, it can detect copy and
pasting, but how can it detect that someone
is writing the student’s essay for them?
are submitting them. Now we see these
businesses advertised around campuses
and online.
We don’t know the extent to which
students are using them. We suspect that
there’s not anywhere near a large majority
of students using them, of course. It would
be the minority of students. We don’t have
any evidence at the moment, but it is a
weakness in our capacity to ensure our
standards for academic integrity.
The idea of Cadmus is a clever one,
I believe, and it’s to look at: can we do
identity authentication at a distance
when students are preparing their written
assignments for submission? The way
Cadmus works is students are required
to do identity verification to log on to the
editing system, and then the editing system
will be able to detect unusual patterns of
data, or text being pasted in, or unusual
patterns of keystrokes, which would
suggest that there is copying being done
from another source.
There’s, if you like, a two-step protection
here, and what I should have said at the
outset, too, is that this is a prototype
under exploration. We are some way from
havi