An Evaluation of the Application of Stylometry and the Keystroke Biometric to Identity Verification of Online Test-Takers

The 2008 Federal Higher Education Opportunity Act requires institutions of higher learning to make greater digital verification efforts to assure that students of record are those actually accessing the systems and taking exams in online courses by adopting verification technologies as they become more ubiquitous. In order to address this problem, keystroke and stylometry biometric systems were investigated with the goal of developing a system of authenticating (verifying) test-takers’ identities in an online environment. Raw data were collected from actual course-related exams taken by 40 students enrolled in a university course. An evaluation of the performance of the keystroke and stylometry systems with respect to text length, number of subjects, and number of samples was made. The results were compared to determine if authorship could be sufficiently delineated through variations between subjects, and the degree of variability within a subject’s writing and keystroke patterns