Wordkitchen to launch "Anticheat" at International Conference of English Teachers

Educational software house Wordkitchen will launch its teacher tool "Anticheat" at the International Conference of English Teachers in Jerusalem on July 12th. Anticheat allows teachers to shuffle the quesions in exams with multiple-choice and open-ended type questions generating an unlimited number of versions. Anticheat works with every subject, using standard Windows programs and is sold to individual teachers as well as colleges and schools.

(PRWEB) July 6, 2004 -- For as long as teachers have been administering exams, test takers have been finding ways to cheat -- from the ancient cribbing garment" used more than one thousand years ago in China to cell phone texting today.

Israeli educational software house "WordKitchen" has developed a software package that takes exams and shuffles the questions and the answers (for multiple choice and open ended type questions) thus generating an unlimited number of versions. Therefore, a student who happens" to look at his neighbors paper will not see the same page.

For generations, teachers have produced multiple test versions with the aid of scissors and paste," explains product developer, Laurin Lewis lecturer in English at Jerusalem College of Technology. In recent years, the use of the word processor has facilitated this operation. However, doing it manually is still very time-consuming and prone to errors."

Using Anticheat, a teacher can generate as many different versions of a test as he or she wants. For each version, the program produces a separate answer key along with a code allowing the teacher to match the answer key to the test.

This is a product whose time has apparently come. According to Dr. Gregory J. Cizek, Professor of Educational Measurement and Evaluation at the University of North Carolina and author of Cheating on Tests: How to Do It, Detect it, Prevent It, tackling the issue is timely.

Says Cizek: Given the increasing importance and consequences associated with testing in the United States, and an apparent decline in students perceptions regarding the wrongness of the behavior, one could easily argue that cheating is becoming more prevalent."

Anticheat has been bought by Hebrew University and other schools and colleges. Currently rwitten in English, the modular design of the source code allows easy creation of interfaces for other languages. Wordkitchen will produce non English versions in co-operation with educational software houses in other countries.

Anticheat author, Laurin Lewis, got the idea for Anticheat while reading an article about the problem of exam cheating. He admits that Anticheat may not be a perfect solution, ...because there are other ways of cheating other than just looking at your neighbors paper. However, Anticheat makes a statement of the educational institutions attitude towards this problem, and therefore its a big step in the right direction," he concludes.

About Anticheat
Anticheat is published by Wordkitchen and a free demo version can be downloaded from www.stop-cheat.com. The program works with Microsoft Word within Windows 95 or later, and other common word processors. AntiCheat is currently priced to be attractive to individual teachers who wish to personally create a first line of defense" against cheating ($39). It is also offered as a site license to concerned institutions (from $200 to $1000 depending on the number of teachers).

About Wordkitchen
Wordkitchen, specializes in educational software, particularly in the field of teaching English as a foreign language. Other products currently available are Words in Context" a 118 lesson vocabulary-led program based on the books of Dr L A Hill and Business English" for students and managers, both available on disc from www.wordkitchen.com

With four more products in the pipeline Wordkitchen invites distributors of educational software, potential strategic partners and investors to get in touch.

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