Alleviation of Cheating in English Academic Writing Exams Using a Developed Tracking Application

Examinations play an important role in the teaching/learning processes to measure students’ learning outcomes. Today, to comply with the social distancing policy, it has become a big concern for organizing the test online when the students are asked to take a test and submit an answer online. Occasionally, it is likely that students may conduct cheating during the online tests, particularly when no proctor is executed. Submission of exam answers through electronic files may create opportunity for the students to help one another or obtain the answers from the Internet. Therefore, the detection and prevention are needed to monitor the testing process to ensure that the examinations really measure the students’ competence. Educational credentials must show actual students’ knowledge to retain their academic value to society. This work proposed a method to develop an application that can assist instructors in detecting the students’ misconduct when taking academic writing tests. To achieve this, the time spent on writing each part and the content of an essay can be tracked. This method can also be used to fulfill other methods using devices such as webcams and microphones. The information the students typed was kept during exam. Each student was requested to submit not only the answer file, but also the encrypted file recording how the students wrote the answer. Finally, the answer file and the encrypted file were checked by the instructors and then the score was given based on the answer file or both of them. Keywords—academic writing, cheating, examination, tracking exam answering