Taking the exams in students' laptops

[Uday Kiran <ukiran () HCT AC AE>]

We have been facing this issue since long time, but thought of putting it here to have your valuable feedback. We have 
BYOD policy for students in general and for the semester exams they are using the same laptops.

A few students are misusing this privilege and trying to cheat the exam in various ways,

a)       Someone in their friends list will take TeamViewer or any such similar technologies to take the exam remotely, 
proctor sees only if the students is moving mouse or not.

b)      Concurrent logins, our LMS (Blackboard) keeps the session active since the exam attempt has to be active for 
certain time, which is for a genuine reason and we will not be disable it (Bb Learn as well did not recommend it); 
students login to LMS portal before the exam and keep it active with one of their friends, they will be in the exam 
hall with their laptops and attempt the exam as normal. The exam password will be shared to the remote friend either 
through iCalendar or any other means, now the remote friend has access and can attempt the exam. Also in Macbooks it is 
very easy to bypass the Respondus Lock Down Browser and many students bring Macbooks for the exams remaining times it 
is normal Lenovo or whatever.

Limitations we have;

a)       We will not be able to conduct the exams on our owned devices since we have 25,000 students and assigning 
everyone a device is not only difficult to manage but also the huge budget.

b)      Enabling the MFA, we should issue hard tokens which is again over head to the local IT Support teams and of 
course the cost, soft tokens cannot be used since mobiles are not allowed in the exam hall.

c)       Multiple logins cannot be disabled, even Blackboard as well did not recommend.

Regards,

Uday Kiran
Senior Specialist –Information Security
Higher Colleges of Technology - UAE
















Uday Kiran
Snr Spl – Information Security
Office of Dir. Digital Technologies
اوداي كيران
أخصائي أول - أمن المعلومات
تكنولوجيا المعلومات


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