Cheating in online exams and cheating in video games share more in common than many people realize. In both environments, bad actors look for ways to capture information, automate actions, and gain an unfair advantage, often using tools designed to stay hidden from detection.

In this video conversation, Pat Hughes, VP of IT Assessments at ITS, speaks with Chris Glacken, Director of Innovative Technologies, about how cheating techniques seen in the gaming world, such as aimbots and hidden overlays, closely resemble emerging methods used to compromise online assessments. Chris explains how these tools work, why they are effective, and how similar patterns are emerging in exam security.

For assessment professionals focused on maintaining fairness and exam integrity, this discussion highlights why understanding cross-industry cheating tactics can help inform stronger, more resilient security approaches.

Video Transcript

[Onscreen: A split-screen of Chris Glacken (left) and Pat Hughes (right) chatting virtually.]

Pat Hughes: Hi, my name’s Pat Hughes, and I’m the Vice President of IT Assessments at ITS. Today I am joined by Chris Glacken. So Chris, why don’t you introduce yourself and your role at ITS.

Chris Glacken: All right. Yeah. So, I’m Chris Glacken. I’m Director of Innovative Technologies at ITS, and I’m responsible for our Windows and Mac secure browsers, as well as our ProctorNow remote proctoring platform.

Why Cheating Is a Problem in Both Gaming and Exams

Pat: Very cool. Chris, you and I both play a lot of video games, and we’ve seen some parallels to concerns that happen in video games and the same concerns in their applications towards the testing industry. Why don’t you talk a little bit about how big a problem cheating is in the video game space?

Chris: Yeah, cheating is definitely a problem. It’s going to depend on the game that you’re playing. Some games are more likely to have a large set of cheaters than others. And you could say the same about certifications, too. So it’s really just where is that value coming into play?

But yeah, it really makes the playing field not level. It makes it so that people who aren’t cheating, really don’t have a way to keep up and have a good time when there are other people in the same lobby who are doing these hacks and making their lives miserable.

Pat: Yeah, I can tell you, as a console gamer, it’s always a decision whether I want to allow cross-play, so I’m mixed in with the computer gamers or not. At a high level, how has that sort of exposure influenced your work as the head of our ITS proctoring and secure browser technologies?

Chris: Well, in a lot of ways besides the fact of just the a lot of commonalities between the types of cheats that you might see in a video game versus the type of cheats you might see on an assessment, and the crosspollination between the populations of the people that might be doing that or probably you’re going to get a little subset of that within the assessments too. But going back to that fair play, right? In assessment, you want to make sure that the playing field is level and everybody is playing by the same rules, and keep that value of the certification. So, it’s really important to make sure that you are not having those cheating scenarios within your certification.

What Aimbots Reveal About Modern Cheating Techniques

Pat: Totally agree. Let’s get a little more specific on examples and maybe where some of those parallel exists. For those who aren’t necessarily aware of what an aimbot is in a computer game, can you explain what they are and how they work?

Chris: Sure. So, in your first first-person shooter games, the objective is to neutralize the other opponent, right? So, you’re on a team and you have all these other people running around. And so at a really basic level, what you’re doing is you’re controlling a little icon on the screen, and you’re moving it to a moving target, and you’re clicking a button and firing that shot, taking that opponent out. And so what aimbots do is they automate that process for you. So they tap into the memory. They read where these things are on the screen. They move the cursor for you, pretty much eliminate the human aspect, and make a more automated approach. And so now all of a sudden you have this application that’s helping you either fire the shot for you or at least putting your mouse cursor exactly where it needs to go. And now you’re taking out people at a near-perfect rate as opposed to people that aren’t doing that.

Parallels Between Aimbots and AI-Based Exam Cheating

Pat: And now the audience might understand why I’m hesitant to enable cross-play. So if we shift this back to exams a little bit, there has been a broad introduction of AI-based cheating tools. Things like plugins or other tools built to enable people to automatically answer multiple-choice questions as part of taking exams. So, how is that similar to an aimbot?

Chris: There are a lot of similarities there. So, if you break down the two styles of cheats there, so an aimbot, the first thing you have to do is get the data. You have to figure out where that person is on the screen. From an assessment perspective, your job is to get that content. Whether it’s a multiple-choice item, essay item, what is your stem, what is the thing that needs to be answered? You need to capture that.

The second piece is processing that data. An aimbot, you’re going to take that information, and you’re going to use that to figure out where your cursor should be. And in an assessment, you’re going to take that information and most likely run it through an LLM that’s going to know the correct answer and then figure out what the correct answer is on the screen.

Then you have the third part, and an aimbot is kind of optional. You could do the clicking yourself, or you can have it automated, and the assessment is kind of optional, too. It’s how do you get that response back to the user? Do you do it through using automation tools, by highlighting the correct answer and clicking it for you? Or maybe there’s some kind of audio or visual cue that’s off the screen, something like that. There are three main parts: get the data, process the data, and handle the response.

Applying Gaming Anti-Cheat Lessons to Online Exam Security

Pat: So what can we, as assessment professionals, do to learn from the way video game companies are trying to interrupt aimbots and fight aimbots? And, how do we at ITS take these learnings and apply them?

Chris: Yeah, it’s, it’s really interesting. It’s never-ending. It’s a cat and mouse. There is no one answer, but there are a lot of sites out there where you can go and look at how people are cheating in video games, and you can just kind of use that information and figure out it’s pretty feasible that they’re going to be taking the same approach and using it on an assessment.

An example of this is if you take a video game and you want to put an overlay on there that’s going to help you either do an aimbot or some other cheat, I have access to a set of menus, but you don’t want the game to notice it, right? So, this has been long shut down, but back in the original days, you would just kind of make that window invisible. So, we’re already seeing these apps come out. They’ve been out for a while, but now they’re getting notoriety like the Interview Coder, where basically they’re putting that same kind of technology onto their window and hiding it, right? This is base-level easy stuff to detect from that standpoint.

But those are the things that you wonder, like, ‘Okay, well, there’s a lot of crossover there,’ and that’s something I care about as an assessment provider too. And you can look at how the video game industry is handling that. Now that’s a really basic example. Things are way more complicated. You got DMA, that kind of stuff going on now, but just as a general concept, that’s the idea of how you take one and apply it to the other.

Pat: Super helpful, Chris. I think it’s it’s always good to know that we’re not the only industry that deals with problems like this, and there are learnings that we can share across each other. So, thanks for your time today, and hopefully, the audience got something out of it. Thanks, Chris.

Chris: All right. Thank you. Bye.

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About the Speakers