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My professor accused me of cheating on a exam I took a few months ago by accessing the exam before I was supposed to (I had arranged to take it later than the other students in the class.) His sole evidence of this was the tracking statistics feature in Blackboard which purportedly shows that I accessed the exam multiple times before I was supposed to. I know for a fact that I did not do this. I was then told by the integrity council that unless I can show that these statistics were faulty somehow that I would be convicted. Does anyone know if there are any bugs or limitations with the tracking statistics feature that I can use to prove my innocence?

falsely_accused2000
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    Similar questions about issues with Blackboard: Accused of cheating due to the time accounted by Blackboard, Accused of Cheating during an online exam – GoodDeeds Jun 03 '21 at 20:29
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    @GoodDeeds It seems like those similar posts involve a good deal more inference, though - I suspect this will be significantly harder to argue against than those two. (Just a hunch.) – Aaron Montgomery Jun 03 '21 at 22:37
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    This seems tricky. Do you have roommates that are using your computer or similar? What was happening on your various devices (phone; computer) at the time of the test? Did you have the test site up on a browser for use later when you got home? – Dawn Jun 04 '21 at 19:25
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    What was the reason you had arranged to take it later than the other students in the class? – Nobody Jun 05 '21 at 13:51
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    I would ask how was the exam accessible in the first place, anyway? If someone can circumvent the safety features, how is it that they are logged? – Captain Emacs Jun 05 '21 at 14:34
  • Have you shared your login credentials with anyone else? If so, and if you are absolutely positive you did not access the exam yourself, then you need a serious discussion with the other person. Is your password on this list? – Bob Brown Jun 05 '21 at 15:33
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    @CaptainEmacs: As a long-time Blackboard user, the default case is that the test is available generally to the whole class (e.g., incl. OP), and maybe the instructor adds a password for access after that time (distributed to a subset of students). There is the capacity to change availability time entirely for individual students, but it's buried way down in a series of menus, and very few instructors know about that (I've never used it myself). So the don't-access-early likely appears to be on the honor system to the student. – Daniel R. Collins Jun 05 '21 at 16:25
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    @DanielR.Collins Why would anyone make the test accessible before the time, though? Honour codes should be reserved for things that are not easy to enforce or hard to capture algorithmically. One should not lead people into temptation to break such codes by lazy setups. – Captain Emacs Jun 05 '21 at 17:07
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    @CaptainEmacs Agreed, and one could also perhaps click on it accidentally, without intending to (I am not familiar with Blackboard's UI, but in general this could happen). – GoodDeeds Jun 05 '21 at 17:35
  • @CaptainEmacs: As I said: most instructors aren't aware of the option to individualize availability start times. – Daniel R. Collins Jun 05 '21 at 18:44
  • I leave ~20 thousands tabs open in the browser of my laptop, many of them with persistent/automated logins, so every time I close the lid of the laptop and then open it, the pages are updated (accessing the remote side and being logged by whatever logging system is in place). Some of them are download links, if by error I close the browser, when I recover it the file is downloaded again. I have no idea about Blackboard, can some of this apply to it? Anyhow, offer yourself to take again the exam as soon as possible for the sake of fair evaluations, yours and of the others. – EarlGrey Jun 07 '21 at 13:14
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    @EarlGrey No, I don't think that defense makes sense here. The log referred to is presumably not a log of Blackboard activity in general, but rather of a clickthrough to the exam itself. This would have required action and could not have been from something like a passive browser tab reload. I'll also add that the suggestion to retake the test makes little sense; either the professor's view is that the student cheated (so a retake is not deserved) or they did not (so a retake is unnecessary). – Aaron Montgomery Jun 07 '21 at 16:20

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I'm a college computer science instructor who's been using Blackboard to deliver tests for about ten years at this point (and used the platform generally ten years before that). I frequently scan the testing time logs for various bits of information on student performance.

I've never seen any outrageous time logs that failed to synch with the actual time of the test availability. I'm not aware of any system bugs in that regard, nor have any theory about how such could happen.

If your instructor has actual time logs showing such a discrepancy, then I don't see any way to argue that away.

Daniel R. Collins
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