Cheating and plagiarism are common concerns for hiring teams. Companies want to make sure they can trust that a candidate’s work represents their own skills, not someone else's. To make identifying and addressing these concerns easier, CodeSignal's Suspicion Score identifies possible code integrity incidents automatically.
We flag potentially suspicious activity from a variety of sources and synthesize those data points to assign a trust level for each question submission. With the appropriate context, you can decide whether flagged incidents need further review. Suspicion Score is a good starting point for further conversations with your team about integrity in the hiring process.
Where do I find Suspicion Score?
Note: Only customers who have opted into the beta for this feature will have access.
Suspicion Score lives in a candidate's Coding Report. From any Pre-Screen results list, click on a candidate's name to bring up their Coding Report. There, you will see a Pre-Screen Signals section which includes an item called “Integrity Review Suggested.” Integrity Review Suggested flags candidate attempts that you may want to review by looking at the Suspicion Score for each question.
Scrolling down to the Questions section of the Coding Report, you'll see individual Suspicion Scores for each question. These scores offer a more in-depth look at where a candidate's behavior may require additional review.
What is Integrity Review and what does it tell me?
Integrity Review Suggested consolidates flags from all aspects of a candidate's submission to help you identify results you might want to investigate.
There are four possible values for Integrity Review Suggested:
- Yes
- No
- N/A
- Pending...
"Yes" does not mean a candidate definitely cheated, but it means there's enough suspicious activity that you should consider looking into that submission more closely. "No" means there weren't enough red flags in a candidate's behavior to necessitate further review. "N/A" means Integrity Review Suggested was not run for that submission (e.g., question type or framework is not supported), or that there was an internal error. Lastly, "Pending..." is a placeholder while Integrity Review Suggested finishes running; if you see this status, check back soon for an update.
What do I do if an Integrity Review is suggested?
If an Integrity Review is suggested, the recommended next step is to look at the Suspicion Scores for each question. These scores, which range from None, for no suspicious behavior, to High, for a large amount of suspicious behavior, can help you pinpoint where possible misconduct occurred.
Suspicion Scores draw from a variety of data, so they can describe multiple kinds of suspicious behavior. The drop-down next to each Suspicion Score contains more information about some of the variables that went into that particular score.
This is a sample of some of the available flags:
The flags that make up Suspicion Scores can alert you to situations where it looks like a candidate might have received external assistance. This could mean the candidate was copying off another candidate's answers, looking at leaked materials, or using tools like generative AI to come up with code. Because Suspicion Score uses data from across the millions of interviews and evaluations conducted on the CodeSignal platform, we can analyze every solution to identify multiple types of suspicious behavior patterns.
For each type of suspicious event, there is an action item linked in blue (in this case, View Replay). These buttons bring up more information to help give context for why CodeSignal flagged these particular instances.
Depending on the context of how you're using the evaluation in question, Suspicion Score may flag behaviors that your company doesn't find suspicious or unethical. Therefore, it's important to understand the context surrounding individual Suspicion Scores. If you're ever in doubt, your Customer Success Manager can help talk through what different Suspicion Scores might mean for candidates at your company.
What kinds of decisions can Suspicion Score help me make?
Suspicion Score is a remarkably flexible feature because it doesn't just lead to one "right" answer. Instead, it's a collection of data that can be used to make determinations in the context of a specific evaluation.
There are some kinds of decisions that Suspicion Score cannot help you make. For example, you shouldn't treat a high Suspicion Score like a guarantee that a candidate was cheating. Innocent behaviors can sometimes look suspicious, and different companies have different perspectives on the use of outside tools.
What Suspicion Score can do is nudge you toward a good first place to look for behaviors that might threaten the integrity of your results. It can help narrow your focus to specific instances of suspicious behavior, making the most of your hiring team's valuable time. Suspicion Score can also spark conversations about what integrity means in your specific context, and which behaviors are off the table during an evaluation.
Still have questions? Reach out to your Customer Success Manager or email us at support@codesignal.com.