The use of unproctored internet-based testing for employee selection is widespread. Although this mode of testing has advantages over onsite testing, researchers and practitioners continue to be concerned about potential malfeasance (e.g., cheating and response distortion) under high-stakes conditions. Therefore, the primary objective of the present study was to investigate potential malfeasance effects on the scores of an unproctored internet-based cognitive ability, and a personality test. This was accomplished by implementing a within-subjects design in which test takers first completed the tests as job applicants (high-stakes) or incumbents (low-stakes) then as research participants (low-stakes). The pattern of cognitive ability test score differences was more consonant with a psychometric practice effect than a malfeasance explanation. Thus, the results suggest that, if present, there was no evidence to indicate that wide- scale or systematic malfeasance unduly affected the test scores. This may have been due to the speeded nature of the test, which was used to preempt the potential for widespread cheating. Additionally, the unproctored personality administration resulted in similar mean shifts and similar proportions of test takers being suspected of distorting their responses as that reported in the extant literature for proctored tests. In their totality, these results suggest that an unproctored internet-based administration does not uniquely threaten personality measures in terms of elevated levels of response distortion compared to proctored measures.

<p>Syften för denna studie har varit: ”att beskriva en variation av uppfattningar hos gymnasieelever på teoretiska gymnasieprogram vad gäller hur de uppfattar och resonerar omkring sitt eget skolfusk i förhållande till fenomen som eleverna själva uppfattar som betydelsefulla för det egna skolfusket” och ”att belysa elevers uppfattningar om sitt eget skolfusk genom fyra allmänt kända teoretiska perspektiv som kan antas tangera den förförståelse av elevers skolfusk som antas vanligt förekommande hos lärare på motsvarande gymnasieprogram.”</p><p>Begreppet skolfusk har definierats och data har därefter samlats in genom kvalitativt utformade enkäter som besvarats av 36 gymnasielever från det studieförberedande samhällsvetenskapsprogrammet. Forskningsansatsen har varit fenomengrafisk och analysmetoden kontextuell analys.</p><p>Huvudresultatet utgörs av fem kategorier som på kvalitativt skilda sätt beskriver elevernas uppfattningar kring skolfusk. Kategorierna har rubricerats efter det totala materialets mest meningsbärande aspekt, nämligen elevernas uppsåt/avsikt/intention med sitt skolfusk som utgörs av variationerna ”att klara av en tillfälligt besvärlig situation”, ”att utmana/provocera/protestera emot (skol)systemet”, ”att överleva i en skolsituation som upplevs för svår”, ”att höja betyg” och ”att slippa anstränga sig”.</p><p>Empirin har också tolkats genom fyra teoretiska perspektiv som i studien ansetts representativa för lärares förförståelse kring elevers skolfusk. Av resultatet framgår att ett flertal elever i sina uppfattningar om eget skolfusk ensidigt orienterar sig åt prestationspsykologiska, sociologiska eller mikroekonomiska perspektiv.</p> / <p>The aims of this study have been: “to describe a variation of conceptions among upper secondary pupils in theoretical education programs concerning how they apprehend and reason about their own school cheating in relations to phenomena that the pupils themselves judge as meaningful for their own school cheating” and “to illustrate pupils conceptions of their own school cheating through four common known theoretical perspectives which can be considered to touch upon the precomprehension of pupils school cheating that is considered as frequent among teachers in corresponding education.”</p><p>The conception school cheating has been defined and data have been collected through qualitatively designed questionnaires which have been answered by 36 upper secondary pupils in social science education preparing for ensuing studies. The research approach has been phenomenografical and the method of analyzing contextual analysis.</p><p>The main result is constituted by five categories which in qualitative different ways describe the pupils conceptions of school cheating. The categories have been classified on the basis of the most meaningful aspect of the total data, “the pupils intentions of their school cheating” which is constituted by the variations “to manage a temporary troublesome situation”, “to challenge/provoke/protest upon the (school)system”, “to survive in a school situation which is experienced as to difficult”, “to raise grades” and “to avoid effort”.</p><p>Empirical data have also been interpreted through four theoretical perspectives which in the study have been considered representative for teachers precomprehension of pupils school cheating. The result shows that a majority of pupils is one-sided orientated in their conceptions of their own school cheating towards perspectives of either achievement-psychology, sociology or micro-economics.</p>

Previous research indicates that there are a number of factors that contribute to one’s propensity to engage in cheating. The purpose of the current study was to explore trends in relationships, cheating, and attraction, and to determine the extent to which electronic media influences these. In a self-report survey of 265 participants (217 females; M age 20.9; SD 1.5), it was found that sociosexual orientation and impulsivity were related to past and current cheating, and increased quality of alternatives, diminished commitment and dissatisfaction were associated with current cheating. Impulsivity, quality of alternatives and diminished commitment were also found to be associated with electronic extradyadic intimacy. Finally, diminished commitment and increased perceived quality of alternatives were found to be associated with attraction to close cross-sex friends. Implications for research and clinical practice are discussed.

Older adults inadvertently plagiarize more than young adults (McCabe, Smith, & Parks, 2007). One current explanation proposes that this effect can be understood in terms of age-related declines in working and episodic memory (McCabe et al., 2007). The current study tested this hypothesis by placing groups of young and older adult participants under divided attention while performing within the typical experimental paradigm. Results indicated that for some measures, dividing the attention of young adults equated their performance to older adults with full attention. For other measures, older adults still produced more errors. Except for false recall, regression analyses revealed that episodic and working memory accounted for age-related variance in these plagiarism errors. The current findings provide tenuous support for the McCabe et al. (2007) hypothesis and suggest other factors may be at play.

Thesis (M.S.)--Missouri State University, 2008. / "May 2008." Includes bibliographical references (leaves 34-37). Also available online.

Thesis (M.A.)--Wheaton College Graduate School, 2006. / Abstract. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 47-50).

Thesis (M.A. in education)--Washington State University, May 2010. / Title from PDF title page (viewed on June 23, 2010). "College of Education." Includes bibliographical references (p. 54-57).

Em geral, jogos classificados como ‘jogos online maciçamente multijogador’, ou massively multiplayer online games (MMOGs) são simulações interativas, competitivas, em tempo real e em larga escala, de mundos virtuais gráficos. Atualmente, a maioria (se não todos) os MMOGs lançados comercialmente são implementados como serviços centralizados, onde centenas ou até milhares de máquinas servidoras, mantidas pelo provedor do serviço do jogo, são responsáveis por executar quase toda a simulação do mundo virtual. Isto implica em gastos significativos em equipamentos e comunicação por parte dos provedores do jogo. Vários trabalhos tentam reduzir o custo de hospedar um MMOG propondo modelos de distribuição da simulação mais descentralizados (peer-to-peer), onde a simulação é movida parcialmente ou totalmente dos servidores (máquinas dos provedores do jogo) para os nós clientes, tipicamente PCs de jogadores conectados por banda larga residencial. Porém, a tentativa de descentralizar um MMOG cria problemas de segurança, na medida em que a simulação passa a ser delegada a nós clientes, que são nós intrinsecamente não-confiáveis que ganham a oportunidade de trapacear no jogo, burlando as regras, visto que as regras da simulação serão executadas por estes. Existem vários tipos de trapaças, mas nós mostramos nesta tese que é possível argumentar que a trapaça de estado (state cheating) e ataques de negação de serviço são as ameaças mais significativas para MMOGs peer-to-peer. Como consequência, nós propomos o FreeMMG 2, um novo modelo de descentralização de MMOGs baseado na divisão do mundo virtual em células que são mantidas individualmente por grupos separados de peers voluntários que executam um processo daemon, não-interativo de simulação. Cada peer de uma célula contém uma réplica completa do estado da célula e se sincroniza de forma tanto conservadora quanto otimista com cada outro peer (réplica) da célula, enquanto ao mesmo tempo recebe comandos de jogo e dissemina atualizações de jogo para as máquinas ‘cliente’ dos jogadores do jogo. Devido à replicação e à seleção aleatória de peers para as células, nós mostramos que o FreeMMG 2 é resistente a trapaça de estado. E, devido ao uso de um peer back-up secreto para cada peer réplica primária da célula, nós mostramos que ataques de negação de serviço contra os peers não irão aumentar de forma significativa a probabilidade de ocorrência de trapaça de estado ou de perda total do estado da célula atacada. Através de simulação de rede, nós mostramos que o FreeMMG 2 é escalável e que utiliza a largura de banda dos clientes de forma eficiente. Assim, mostramos que uma abordagem baseada em replicação de suporte a MMOGs, considerando clientes com conectividade à Internet realística (sem IP multicast e com banda larga doméstica), é viável. / Typically, games classified as ‘massively multiplayer online games’ (MMOGs) are competitive, real-time, large-scale interactive simulations of graphical virtual worlds. Currently, most (if not all) commercial MMOGs are implemented as centralized services, where hundreds or even thousands of ‘server’ machines, maintained by the game service provider, are responsible for running almost all of the virtual world simulation. This incurs a significant equipment and communication cost for the game providers. Several works attempt to reduce the cost of hosting a MMOG by proposing more decentralized, peer-to-peer models for distributing the simulation among client (player-owned PCs with consumer-grade broadband) and server (provider-owned) machines, with some going as far as eliminating the need for provider-owned machines altogether. Decentralizing a MMOG, however, creates security issues, as the simulation is now delegated to untrusted client nodes which gain opportunities to cheat the game rules, as the rules are now executed by them. There are several types of cheats, but we show in this thesis that a case can be made for considering state cheating and denial-of-service attacks as the most significant threats for peer-to-peer MMOGs. In light of this, we propose FreeMMG 2, a new MMOG decentralization model based on the division of the virtual world into cells that are maintained individually by separate groups of volunteer peers that are running a non-interactive, daemon simulation process. Each peer of a cell contains a full replica of the cell state and synchronizes both conservatively and optimistically with every other peers (replicas) of the cell, while at the same time receiving game commands and disseminating game updates to actual player machines. Due to its cell replication and random peer selection, we show that FreeMMG 2 is resistant to state cheating. And, due to the use of one secret back-up peer for every primary replica peer of the cell, we show that denial-of-service attacks don’t significantly increase the odds of either state cheating or cell state loss happening. Through network simulation we verify that FreeMMG 2 is scalable and bandwidth-efficient, showing that a replication-based approach to peer-to-peer MMOG support, considering peers with realistic Internet connectivity (no IP multicast and consumer-grade broadband), is a viable one.

No presente trabalho, é testada e avaliada a aplicação de Redes Neurais Artificiais no combate de trapaças (cheating, em inglês) do tipo speed cheating em jogos online massivos de múltiplos jogadores, também conhecidos como MMOG (Massively Multi- player Online Games). Os MMOG representam um modelo de negócio onde quantias significativas de recursos financeiros estão envolvidas, e crescem a cada dia. Os mode- los para o combate de trapaças, que possam afastar jogadores de jogos ou servidores, estão localizados na camada de rede, à nível de protocolo. Analisando o estado-da-arte, constatou-se que não existem trabalhos explorando a área de Inteligência Artificial para este fim, tornando-se assim relevante o estudo de sua aplicabilidade. As Redes Neurais Artificiais foram escolhidas por terem grande poder de abstração, generalização e plasti- cidade. Através dos resultados obtidos comparando-se duas abordagens de arquiteturas, as redes Perceptron de múltiplas camadas (MLP) e as redes com atraso no tempo focadas (FTLFN), é possível constatar que é viável a utilização das mesmas para este fim, tendo-se alcançado resultados positivos no combate de speed cheating em MMOGs. / In the present work, Artificial Neural Networks are tested and evaluated in order to avoid a specific type of cheating, called Speed Cheating, in massively multi-player online games (MMOG). The MMOG represent a business model where meaningful financial resources amounts are involved, and increase each day. The models to avoid cheating, that could keep off players from games and servers, are localized in the network layer, at the protocol level. Examining the state-of-art, it was observed that research explor- ing the Artificial Intelligence application to this goal becomes relevant. The Artificial Neural Networks were chosen by their significant abstraction, generalization and plas- ticity characteristics. Through the results’s comparison from two different architectures approaches, the multi layer Perceptron network (MLP) and the focused time lagged net- work (FTLFN), it was possible to conclude that their utilization avoiding speed cheating in MMOG is possible, once good results were found in this work.

The maintenance of cooperation and altruism in the face of manipulation by exploitative cheaters that reap the benefits of cooperative acts without paying the associated costs is a conundrum in evolutionary biology. Cheaters should spread through a population causing it to crash, yet cooperation is common. There are many models and theories that attempt to explain this apparent contradiction. The social amoeba Dictyostelium discoideum, like many microbial species has been used as a model organism to test these theories and to begin to understand the genetic mechanisms behind social behaviours. The aim of this PhD project is to quantify the interactions that occur between naturally-occurring genotypes during social competition in order to identify the types of cheating behaviours and to understand the evolutionary consequences of such behaviours. I first demonstrate that there is a social hierarchy of genotypes and that cheaters can increase their own fitness by increasing their own spore allocation or decreasing their partner's allocation the precise nature of which is dependent upon unique interactions between each competing pair. I also show that the outcome of social competition is dependent upon the physical environment where it can be significantly reduced, or even avoided by segregation of genotypes during development. Finally, it is demonstrated in a collaborative project that much of the observed social behaviour can be explained in terms of the production of and response to developmental signals.