Using Digital Logs to Reduce Academic Misdemeanour by Students in Digital Forensic Assessments

Identifying academic misdemeanours and actual applied effort in student assessments involving practical work can be problematic. For instance, it can be difficult to assess the actual effort that a student applied, the sequence and method applied, and whether there was any form of collusion or collaboration. In this paper we propose a system of using digital logs generated by selected software tools (such as FTK-Forensic Toolkit and EnCase) for the purpose of identifying the effort and sequence of events that students followed to complete their learning activities (say, arriving at conclusions relating to an assessment question) and, thereby, determining whether it is likely that an academic misdemeanour may have occurred. The paper elaborates on an assessment exercise conducted with a cohort of 67 students in a specific class of disciplinary learning, highlighting the process that students have to follow, and then proceeds to show in some details how selected logging facilities can be used to provide evidence that students may have committed an academic misdemeanour. (Contains 7 figures.)