Impersonation Challenges Associated With E-Assessment of University Students

Abstract

Online examination (E-assessment) is an increasingly important component of online courses, and student authentication is widely seen as one of the major concerns for online examinations. Due to the inherent anonymity of being online, compared to taking an examination in a classroom environment, students may attempt to artificially boost their scores in online examination. This may occur by having another individual take the exam for them, which a typical user/password authentication scheme cannot detect. This research aims to investigate authentication challenges to online examinations, review benefits, constraints of existing authentication traits, and discuss alternative techniques. This will lead to the use of a profile based authentication framework (PBAF) together with user-id and password for the authentication of students during online examinations. The proposed –solution will utilize profile based challenge questions, user-id and password, which will be verified by development of PBAF in a virtual learning environment. The sample size will be obtained from a group of E-learning University students. Descriptive method of research will be used in order to develop better understanding of finding out what is happening, to seek new insight, to ask questions and to assess phenomena in a new light with the use of questionnaires. Data will be analyzed through descriptive statistics where graphs, pie charts, frequency distribution tables and histograms will be used, factor analysis will be employed. Statistical Package for the Social Sciences (SPSS) will also be used as software to analyze data. As a result of this research e-assessment will be deemed more secure in terms of the authentication process.

Key Words: Authentication, E-Learning,E-Assessment, Impersonation