Moodlegate: securing computer driven exam environments

Abstract

Moodle installations that are used to make assessments inevitably run the risk of being used to obtain fraudulent results by the students. Such fraud can be mitigated through the use of auditing tools that detect abnormal behaviour, but students continue to attempt to cheat the system despite theknowledge that these tools are active. This article presents a tool that blocks a range of behaviours which could be used by students fraudulently. This result is achieved by implementing access control to any Moodle deployment. The access control is based on the identity of the Moodle user, time and date, computer (or range of computers), and the Moodle resources that are being accessed. Byintegrating with Moodle, the tool is able to provide a finer level of access control than would be provided by traditional network access control devices such as firewalls. This increases the assurance that the results of Moodle driven exam assessments are accurate.