An Intelligent Approach for Fair Assessment of Online Laboratory Examinations in Laboratory Learning Systems Based on Student’s Mouse Interaction Behavior

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic has made the world focus on providing effective and fair online learning systems. As a consequence, this paper proposed a new intelligent, fair assessment of online examinations for virtual and remotely controlled laboratory experiments running through Laboratory Learning Systems. The main idea is to provide students with an environment similar to being physically present in a Laboratory while conducting practical experiments and exams and detecting cheating with high accuracy at a minimal cost. Therefore, an intelligent assessment module is designed to detect cheating students by analyzing their mouse dynamics using Artificial Intelligence. The mouse interaction behavior method was chosen because it does not require any additional resources, such as a camera and eye tribe tracker, to detect cheating. Various AI algorithms, such as KNN, SVC, Random Forest, Logistic Regression, XGBoost, and LightGBM have been used to classify student mouse behavior to detect cheating, and many metrics are used to evaluate their performance. Moreover, experiments have been conducted on students answering online laboratory experimentations while cheating and when answering the exams honestly. Experimental results indicate that the LightGBM AI algorithm achieves the best cheat detection results up to an accuracy of 90%, precision of 88%, and degree of separation of 95%.