Profile based student authentication in online examination

Online examination is an increasingly important component of online courses, and student authentication is widely seen as one of the major concerns for online examinations. In most online examination scenarios, face-to-face supervision is absent, and students may attempt to use third party to increase their scores. This paper aims to investigate authentication challenges to online examinations, review benefits and constraints of existing authentication traits, and discuss alternative techniques. We propose the use of profile based authentication framework (PBAF) together with a user-id and password for the authentication of students during online examinations. The proposed solution utilizes profile based challenge questions, which is verified by development of PBAF in a virtual learning environment.