An investigation of keystroke and stylometry traits for authenticating online test takers

The 2008 federal Higher Education Opportunity Act requires institutions of higher learning to make greater access control efforts for the purposes of assuring that students of record are those actually accessing the systems and taking exams in online courses by adopting identification technologies as they become more ubiquitous. To meet these needs, keystroke and stylometry biometrics were investigated towards developing a robust system to authenticate (verify) online test takers. Performance statistics on keystroke, stylometry, and combined keystroke-stylometry systems were obtained on data from 40 test-taking students enrolled in a university course. The best equal-error-rate performance on the keystroke system was 0.5% which is an improvement over earlier reported results on this system. The performance of the stylometry system, however, was rather poor and did not boost the performance of the keystroke system, indicating that stylometry is not suitable for text lengths of short-answer tests unless the features can be substantially improved, at least for the method employed.