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Preventing forgotten Windows sessions reduces student plagiarism and stops unauthorized access

  • Architectural Technology department of the NYCCT (New York City College of Technology)
  • Education
  • United States
Avoid forgotten Windows sessions to reduce student plagiarism and non-authorized access.

The Architectural Technology department of the New York City College of Technology (NYCCT) trains students to assist the architect and perform at a high level on design, working drawings and the construction stages of a building project. Students have access to their own dedicated labs with leading edge computational tools for design computation and digital fabrication. Over 200 machines and workstations are supported by the IT department.

"Administrators can interact remotely with all sessions (open or locked), direct from the console."

IT Manager

The Challenge

Preventing unauthorized access to resources and plagiarism of student’s work

IT recently changed policy to give each student an individual Active Directory account to access any department PC and machine.

Each account has a private file storage area to store homework and assignments. Since work was no longer stored in a shared folder, it limited the risk of students plagiarizing other students' work.

However, allocating individual accounts did not completely solve the plagiarism problem. Forgotten sessions were left open on shared workstations, which meant students were still at risk of accounts being accessed and work being plagiarized.

Forgotten sessions also meant unauthorized students from other departments could still access and benefit from the department's labs and resources.

The Solution

Enforcing single session access, a forced logoff after idle time and remote interaction

The IT team was looking for a way to prevent forgotten sessions from being left open and to ensure access is only from the each students own account. Native Windows options didn't solve this problem easily, so the team was looking for a third-party Windows session management solution.

UserLock offers a unique set of features to control and secure network sessions:

  • Sessions should be automatically logged off after a specific idle time. This ability to force a logoff helps protect all shared workstations which are left open by students.

  • Simultaneous sessions should be prevented, enforcing students to just one open session at a time. Once connected any access attempts from other machines are automatically blocked. This helps ensure students are more motivated to logoff existing sessions as there is a direct consequence to their own access.

  • An option for users to remotely logoff any existing open session helps ensure students aren’t unnecessarily blocked from working due to forgotten sessions left open.

The Result

Securing access frees up resources and saves time for teachers, students, and IT

Now that IT can effectively limit and prevent forgotten sessions being left open, the IT team is less concerned about plagiarism and intrusive behavior from non-architectural students.

Teachers also don’t need to constantly remind their students to logoff, which was a productivity-killing combination of time-consuming and ineffective.

With UserLock, IT administrators can also interact remotely with all sessions (open or locked), direct from the console. This allows them to instantly react and perform corrective actions either by remotely locking, logging off or resetting the appropriate session. This adds huge value to the day-to-day operation of managing a network of shared machines. The IT team is also happy that they no longer need to keep going to the labs themselves to shut machines.