Identifying patterns of features used by automatic detectors of gaming the system behaviors

In the last decades, some research on online education has focused on better understanding a particular type of behavior gamed by students, known as gaming the system. In this article, we follow this track and present the first results of a new research approach to analyze and compare existing features commonly assigned to students used by automatic detectors for the behavior gaming the system in different situations, including problem-solving, considering various criteria. We have addressed the following main research question: What information or feature patterns about the students have been considered by automatic detector models of gaming the system behaviors? To answer this question, we have followed a knowledge discovery methodology in two studies: literature review and pattern identification. These studies were carried out in five concurrent stages: Selection of papers, Identification of the relevant works, Extraction of variables, Creating the patterns, and Mapping of the works in the standards. Results indicate that the detectors reported in the literature use eight variable patterns.