Detection and Evaluation of Cheating on College Exams using Supervised Classification

Text mining has been used for various purposes, such as document classification and extraction of domain-specific information from text. In this paper we present a study in which text mining methodology and algorithms were properly employed for academic dishonesty (cheating) detection and evaluation on open-ended college exams, based on document classification techniques. Firstly, we propose two classification models for cheating detection by using a decision tree supervised algorithm. Then, both classifiers are compared against the result produced by a domain expert. The results point out that one of the classifiers achieved an excellent quality in detecting and evaluating cheating in exams, making possible its use in real school and college environments.