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Errors in Common (EIC) Exam Cheating Index

Nathan Thompson, PhDAugust 22, 2020

This exam cheating index (collusion detection) simply calculates the number of errors in common between a given pair of examinees.  For example, two examinees got 80/100 correct, meaning 20 errors, and they answered all of the same questions wrongly, the EIC would be 20. If they both scored 80/100 but had only 10 wrong questions in common, the EIC would be 10.  There is no probabilistic evaluation that can be used to flag examinees, as with more advanced indices. In fact, it is used inside some other indices, such as Harpp & Hogan.  However, this index could be of good use from a descriptive or investigative perspective.

Note that EIC is not standardized in any way, so its range and relevant flag cutoff will depend on the number of items in your test, and how much your examinee responses vary.  For a 100-item test, you might want to set the flag at 10 items.  But for a 30-item test, this is obviously irrelevant, and you might want to set it at 5 (because most examinees will probably not even get more than 10 errors).

Learn more about applying EIC with SIFT, a free software program for exam cheating detection and other assessment issues.

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Nathan Thompson, PhD

Nathan Thompson earned his PhD in Psychometrics from the University of Minnesota, with a focus on computerized adaptive testing. His undergraduate degree was from Luther College with a triple major of Mathematics, Psychology, and Latin. He is primarily interested in the use of AI and software automation to augment and replace the work done by psychometricians, which has provided extensive experience in software design and programming. Dr. Thompson has published over 100 journal articles and conference presentations, but his favorite remains https://scholarworks.umass.edu/pare/vol16/iss1/1/ .
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