On the verifiability of (electronic) exams

The main concern for institutions that organize exams is to detect when students cheat. Actually more frauds are possible and even authorities can be dishonest. If institutions wish to keep exams a trustworthy business, anyone and not only the authorities should be allowed to look into an exam’s records and verify the presence or the absence of frauds. In short, exams should be verifiable. However, what verifiability means for exams is unclear and no tool to analyze an exam’s verifiability is available. In this paper we address both issues: we formalize several individual and universal verifiability properties for traditional and electronic exams, so proposing a set of verifiability properties and clarifying their meaning, then we implement our framework in ProVerif, so making it a tool to analyze exam verifiability. We validate our framework by analyzing the verifiability of two existing exam systems – an electronic and a paper-and-pencil system.