A New Statistical Index for Detecting Cheaters on Multiple Choice Tests

Abstract

It is important to construct a firm basis for accusing potential violators of academic integrity in order to avoid spurious accusations and false convictions. Educational researchers have developed many statistical methods that can either uncover or confirm cases of cheating on tests. However, most of them rely on simple correlation-based measures, and often fail to account for patterns in responses or answers. In this paper, we propose a new statistical index denoted by a Standardized Signed Entropy Similarity Score to resolve this difficulty. In addition, we apply the proposed method to analyze a real data set and compare the results to other existing methods.