Student cheating has become all too prevalent throughout our education system. Many organizations have chosen to turn a blind eye to cheating that may exist but cheating scandals continue to rock the academic world and can severely and negatively impact a school's brand. The Higher Education Opportunity Act has brought the issue of student authentication to the forefront. If just meeting the minimum requirements of the HEO Act is your objective, there are many alternatives to do that. If, however, ensuring the integrity of your school's brand is important to you, Kryterion offers significant security measures that go above the minimum requirements to ensure that students are authenticated, are deterred from cheating and are detected if they do attempt to cheat. Keystroke patterns, facial recognition, audio and video recording and live proctoring all add confidence as your brand integrity is assured during the testing process.

The Higher Education Opportunity Act:
The Higher Education Act, originally passed in 1965 and reauthorized in August of 2008 under the name of the Higher Education Opportunity Act has called for more student authentication in Distance Education programs. The specific wording from HR. 4137, SEe. 496 is (ii) the agency or association requires an institution that offers distance education to have processes through which the institution establishes that the student who registers in a distance education course or program is the same student who participates in and completes the program and receives the academic credit. The onus is on the accrediting bodies to determine what constitutes appropriate student authentication, from a simple student login to more sophisticated techniques. The real issue here, however, is whether student authentication is truly important to your institution and the protection of your brand of if doing the minimum is enough.

The Kryterion Solution offers a strong method of student authentication without being obtrusive, expensive and while not infringing on potential privacy issues. Digital photographs and facial recognition and keystroke pattern matching ensure that the student is who they are supposed to be during the testing process. Additionally the student ID can be uploaded as another measure of identifying the students.