Cheating on free massive open online courses (MOOCs) happens, according to new research from Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The
study found that learners are signing up for multiple courses and using one
account to get the correct answers for another account.
The strategy is known as CAMEO, from “copying answers
using multiple existences online.” Using the strategy, learners create multiple
accounts to gain access to the correct answers to questions. They then use the
right answers to earn a perfect score and a certificate showing their mastery
of the topic.
“When you see this interweaving of one account from an
Internet location getting a bunch of answers wrong, checking the solutions,
then immediately followed by another account from the same location submitting
the correct answers, you start to get a little suspicious,” said Andrew Ho,
professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, in a report for Inside Higher Education.
Researchers collected data from 115 Harvard and MIT
MOOCs that were offered between fall 2012 and June 2015 and found that at least
1% of the 1,237 certificates awarded were earned by using CAMEO. Only 0.1% of
the cheaters were taking computer science courses, while 1.3% took government,
health, and social science courses. Also, most of the cheaters came from Albania,
Indonesia, Serbia, Colombia, and China.
“One
of the most interesting lessons from the paper is that there are ways to
mitigate cheating that are straightforward and implementable by the teams
creating online course content,” said Isaac L. Chuang, senior associate dean of
digital learning at MIT. “We also expect platform improvements, such as virtual
proctoring, to help reduce cheating.”
