e-Authentication for online assessment: A mixed-method study

Authenticating the students’ identity and authenticity of their work is increasingly important to reduce academic malpractices and for quality assurance purposes in Education. There is a growing body of research about technological innovations to combat cheating and plagiarism. However, the literature is very limited on the impact of e-authentication systems across distinctive end-users because it is not a widespread practice at the moment. A considerable gap is to understand whether the use of eauthentication systems would increase trust on e-assessment, and to extend, whether students’ acceptance would vary across gender, age and previous experiences. This study aims to shed light on this area by examining the attitudes and experiences of 328 students who used an authentication system known as adaptive trust-based e-assessment system for learning (TeSLA). Evidence from mixed-method analysis suggests a broadly positive acceptance of these e-authentication technologies by distance education students. However, significant differences in the students’ responses indicated, for instance, that men were less concerned about providing personal data than women; middle-aged participants were more aware of the nuances of cheating and plagiarism; while younger students were more likely to reject e-authentication, considerably due to data privacy and security and students with disabilities due to concerns about their special needs. Introduction European research on the impact of policies for plagiarism in higher education highlighted an increasing level of student plagiarism and cheating (Bermingham, Watson, & Jones, 2010; IPPHEAE, 2013; Park, 2004; QAA, 2016). The amount of plagiarism and cheating in highstakes assessments has increased with the introduction of e-assessments (Harmon & Lambrinos, 2008; Underwood & Szabo, 2003). This means that the authentication of student digital identities has become especially important for reducing cheating in online distance education (Chew, Ding, & Rowell, 2015). Cheating in online assessments has been examined at various levels. For example, Harmon and Lambrinos’ study (2008) investigated whether online examinations are an invitation to cheat and found that more mature students who have their direct experience or working with VC 2018 The Authors. British Journal of Educational Technology published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd on behalf of BERA This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited and is not used for commercial purposes. British Journal of Educational Technology Vol 00 No 0