​​What to Do When Schools Use Canvas or Blackboard Logs to Allege Cheating

Over the past few months, students from all over the country have reached out to EFF and other advocacy organizations because their schools—including teachers and administrators—have made flimsy claims about cheating based on digital logs from online learning platforms that don’t hold up to scrutiny. Such claims were made against over a dozen students at the Dartmouth Geisel School of Medicine, which EFF and the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) criticized for being a misuse, and misunderstanding, of the online learning platform technology. Dartmouth ended that investigation and dismissed all allegations after a media firestorm. If your school is making similar accusations against students, here’s what we recommend.

Students Deserve the Evidence Against Them

Online learning platforms provide a variety of digital logs to teachers and administrators, but those same logs are not always made available to the accused students. This is unfair. True due process for cheating allegations requires that students see the evidence against them, whether that’s videos from proctoring tools, or logs from test-taking or learning management platforms like Canvas or Blackboard.

Schools should use technology to serve students, rather than using it as a tool to discipline them.

It can be difficult to know what logs to ask for, because different online learning platforms call this data by different names. In the case of Canvas, there may be multiple types of logs, depending on whether a student used the platform to take a test or access course materials while studying for it. 

Bottom line: students should be given copies of any logs that are being cited as evidence of cheating, and any logs that may be exculpatory. It’s all too easy for schools to cherry-pick logs that only indicate possible misconduct. With course material access logs, for example, schools often only share (if they share at all) logs that indicate a student’s device accessed material that is relevant to the subject of the test, while dismissing logs that show access of materials that are less relevant, thus hiding evidence that the access was the result of an automated link between the device and platform. Any allegation should start with the student being shown everything that the administration has access to—and we’re calling on learning platforms like Canvas and Blackboard to give students direct access, too.

A sample log from Blackboard

Digital Logs Are Unreliable Evidence of Cheating

It’s important for both students and school officials to understand why digital logs are unreliable evidence of cheating. Course material access logs, for example, can only show that a page, document, or file was accessed by a device—not necessarily why or by whom (if anyone). Much like a cell phone pinging a tower, logs may show files being pinged by a device in short time periods, suggesting a non-deliberate process, as was the case with the access logs we saw from Dartmouth medical students. It can be impossible to know for sure from the logs alone if a student intentionally accessed any of the files, or if the pings happened due to delayed loading, or automatic refresh processes that are commonplace in most websites and online services. 

Canvas, for its part, has stated multiple times that both test-taking logs and course material access logs are not reliable. According to the company, test-taking logs, which purport to show student activity during a Canvas-administered test, “are not intended to validate academic integrity or identify cheating for a quiz.”  Similarly, logs that purport to show student access to class documents uploaded to Canvas, are also not accurate