ONLINE ASSESSMENT SECURITY REQUIREMENTS FOR HIGHER EDUCATION

Abstract

Assessments are an important part of education and serve to evaluate student learning. The advent of online education and assessments has led institutions in higher education to employ online proctoring tools to maintain academic integrity. The security of these tools is often discussed, but the actual security requirements of online assessments remain unclear. The primary research question of this study focuses on eliciting security requirements for online assessments in higher education.
This research uses a multifaceted approach encompassing document analysis of university regulations, source code analysis of online proctoring tools, and modeling potential threats to online assessments.
Our analysis culminates in four high-level security requirements for online assessments: identifying the student taking the exam, verifying the authenticity of the student’s work during the exam, the student having no prior knowledge of the actual exam materials, and protecting students’ personal data. Compared to traditional offline assessments, privacy has become a more obvious requirement. The other requirements are fundamentally the same for both traditional and online assessments, although threats to their security manifest
themselves differently.
Mitigating threats to online assessments is more difficult than doing so for traditional assessments. This difference in difficulty stems from the institution’s amount of control over the student’s environment and the used device during the assessment. More control over these factors decreases the effort needed to protect assessment integrity. The necessityto maintain assessment integrity largely depends on the importance of the exam, its civil effect, and the risk of fraud being committed. We conclude that online assessments are viable up to a certain level of exam importance and risk of fraud. Ethical considerations
regarding inclusion, privacy, and fairness further emphasize the need for careful consideration when implementing online assessments.

Date of Award	20 Oct 2023
Original language	English
Supervisor	Fabian van den Broek (Examiner) & G Alpár (Co-assessor)