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“There’s a strong need for crime scene unit education, which was never the case before. In the past, it was always the forensic chemistry, forensic examiner side.”
Casper Venter, PhD, Professor and Chair of the Department of Forensic and Investigative Science, West Virginia University.
Crime scene houses and training complexes have become a fixture at forensic science programs across the country.
Marshall University’s Crime Scene House is a two-bedroom apartment with a garage and backyard built for grid searches. George Washington University recently converted a single classroom used as a “crime scene room” into a full apartment with a bedroom, living room, kitchen, and bath. Penn State’s Forensic Cottage, Point Park University’s CSI House, and George Mason’s Crime Scene House all serve the same basic purpose, giving students a physical space to process evidence outside a traditional lab.
These facilities exist to close a specific gap in forensic education. Programs have long relied on lab-based instruction to teach students how to analyze DNA, chemicals, and trace evidence once that evidence reaches a lab. What a lab can’t replicate is the scene itself, the layout of a room, the placement of a body, the physical judgment calls a student has to make before any evidence reaches a bench.
At Columbus State University, faculty describe crime scene simulations as a way to bridge the gap between textbook theory and field practice, giving students the tactical precision and investigative mindset needed once they’re on the job.
West Virginia University’s Department of Forensic and Investigative Science has built one of the largest versions of this idea in the country. Its training complex includes crime houses, a photography studio, a vehicle processing garage, and a ballistics range, all designed around the same principle driving smaller programs elsewhere. Crime scene photography is one of several hands-on skills built into that complex.
“These are components where you would like to see more experimental learning than educational learning. You can teach a lot of this in a classroom, but if students aren’t physically having that camera in their hands and doing the experimental learning, it makes it a little bit more difficult,” shares Dr. Casper Venter, professor and chair in the Department of Forensic & Investigative Science at West Virginia University
Keep reading to learn what makes crime scene complexes such a valuable educational experience, how the program measures the impact of hands-on training, and where AI fits into the future of the field.
Meet the Expert: Casper Venter, PhD
Dr. Casper Venter is professor and chair of the Department of Forensic and Investigative Science at West Virginia University. He began his career in 1989 at a police training college in South Africa, then spent 22 years as a forensic drug chemist with the country’s Forensic Science Laboratory, focusing on clandestine lab investigations.
Dr. Venter joined WVU in 2010 in a faculty-equivalent academic professional role and became department chair in 2019. He holds an undergraduate degree and an honors degree in chemistry, a degree in lab management, a master’s degree in biochemistry, and a PhD in law and science.
What Makes Crime Scene Complexes Such a Valuable Educational Experience
Crime scene complexes give students the chance to make mistakes before those mistakes matter. A student who mishandles evidence in a lab exercise is working with a known sample and a known outcome. A student working a staged crime scene has to make judgment calls in real time: where to enter a room, what to photograph first, how to lift a print without knowing yet whether it belongs to the case. That kind of decision-making cannot be taught from a textbook.
“The majority of forensic science programs focus mostly on forensic chemistry and forensic biology, so that’s all lab-based opportunities for students to go through a program and go into the forensic science lab doing DNA analysis, or focusing on chemical analysis, or toxicology,” says Dr. Venter. “We had a third component that we started many years ago, called the forensic examiner track, focusing more on the pattern evidence side, on biometrics, and on crime scene investigation and death investigation. That’s where the birth of the crime scene complex came from.”
The complex itself is built around three fully furnished crime houses, stocked with furniture from Goodwill, Habitat for Humanity, and student donations, along with roughly 14 mannequins of varying sizes and weights. This space gives students real-world experience in a controlled educational environment.
“We’ve got three crime houses that are fully furnished with different varieties of rooms, from bedrooms to office space, kitchens, living room space. With crime scene one, we start with the basic concepts like breaking and entry. What are the entry phase, the exit point, the 14 steps that the FBI uses for processing smaller crime scenes? From there we build up to a final crime scene where there are multiple victims and multiple teams working together,” he explains.
Beyond the houses, the complex includes a mock roadway built to the exact dimensions of a real street, three donated vehicles, and a firearms facility with close to 300 guns students can dismantle and reassemble. “We can do a hit-and-run accident scenario with all the same dimensions as if it’s happening on a real road. With the donated vehicles, we can put students through the different scenarios. We also have a ballistics facility with a short-range shooting lane; we call it a firearms discharge facility, where students can totally dismantle weapons, put them back together, and see exactly how the mechanics work,” he says.
The Impact of Hands-On Learning
Experiential learning is easy to praise and hard to measure. FEPAC requires accredited programs to track at least one measure of student achievement and publish it, but most schools point to internship placement or job outcomes rather than classroom performance itself.
Dr. Venter ran a more direct test, comparing exam results before and after students touched the material. “I asked short questions on my midterm exam, looking at the theoretical side only, and the average was about 43 percent correct. They really struggled with answering the short questions,” he says. “Then they got rotational labs where the students go to different stations over six weeks and apply what they learned in the theoretical side in an experimental way. I took that exact same question and put it on the final exam, and they went from 43 percent to 88 percent. I proved through that assessment what the value of experimental learning is.”
The internship placement numbers tell a similar story. WVU’s forensic examiner students complete a required 135-hour internship, and the university maintains relationships with roughly 270 outside agencies willing to take them on. “We want to prepare the student not to be a burden for that crime lab or that crime scene unit. They should be an extra pair of hands that can help you through the process,” he says.
Preparing Students for the Field
Part of preparing students goes beyond the mechanics of a crime scene. More than 70 percent of WVU’s forensic science classes carry a writing and speaking component, a requirement built to counter a common tendency among scientists.
“The challenge for scientists and forensic scientists is that we inherently like to play with the instruments and don’t want to talk to anybody,” says Dr. Venter. “Instead we take them out of that comfort zone and force them to speak because that’s what forensic science is all about. You need to go to an open arena and defend your science, in a way that the average person in the jury can understand what you are actually doing and telling them.”
That training carries through to a courtroom testimony course taught by an actual judge, using real student casework rather than hypothetical scenarios. “One of our judges is teaching courtroom testimony of our students using real cases are from the crime scenes, or from the DNA lab, or the chemistry labs,” he shares. “Students do the report writing on the case, and submit it. Then the judge would get private lawyers and defense attorneys to do examination and cross-examination of our students in the courthouses for a semester, forcing them into public speaking to get used to how the courthouse looks inside, and how you’re going to defend the data that you generated in the lab.
The Growing Recognition of Crime Scene Investigation Programs
FEPAC accreditation for a crime scene investigation concentration is still rare. Utah Valley University became one of only two universities in the country to hold the designation when it earned it in 2022.
UW-Platteville earned the same distinction more recently, becoming one of just five programs nationwide with that specific accreditation, out of only 33 FEPAC-accredited bachelor’s programs overall.
Dr. Venter has watched that shift happen over the course of his own career at WVU. “There’s a strong need for the crime scene unit education, which was never the case before. In the past, it was always the forensic chemistry, forensic examiner side that got accreditation through FEPAC. Now they’ve got a separate accreditation line just for crime scene investigation and death investigation. Since then, we have started to see more and more of the old criminal justice programs at universities slowly moving over to the forensic science examiner side,” he says.
The Use of AI In Crime Scene Investigation Education
Forensic science programs are only beginning to figure out where automated tools belong in a curriculum built around physical evidence and courtroom testimony. Fingerprint databases have used algorithmic matching for years, long before “AI” became the term students associate with the technology. However, it is limiting
“Every time I take fingerprints into a database and search them, that’s typically an AI search, because you give certain minutiae markings to the unknown print and search it against known prints in a database using an algorithm,” explains Dr. Venter, “But the search algorithm cannot distinguish between a scar and a ridge ending. It will assign minutiae points at all the scar endings, but the naked eye can clearly see that’s a consecutive line through the ridge, that’s a scar, not a ridge ending.”
He continues, “A lot of what we do is opinion-based, on circumstantial evidence. AI can assist you in some ways, but it cannot formulate an opinion based on experience. The more you’re doing these crime scenes, the more you can visualize certain things from experience. You can also look at exonerations and innocence project cases. If you have AI solving the crime and the person is actually innocent, who are you going to blame afterward? It’s going to be inexcusable to go to court and say I don’t make the decision, that was my instrument.”
Cold case work is one area where Dr. Venter sees a legitimate role for the technology, even as he maintains its limits elsewhere. “We do a lot of cold case research now, digitizing old cases and running AI to see if there are common trends we might have missed back then. We’ve had some successes applying that. But the opinion side will never be taken over by AI,” he says.
Advice for Students Entering the Field
WVU’s program is built around a set of requirements Dr. Venter considers non-negotiable for any student evaluating a school.
“We built our program on three pillars. The first is quality faculty. I can be a chemist teaching organic chemistry, and it’s possible I can take a handbook and teach forensics, but you will never have that experimental learning and experience that you can build over time. You want faculty with a diverse knowledge base as well as real experience, because it’s not just about the theory; it’s also about the hands-on learning,” says Dr. Venter.
FEPAC accreditation is the second pillar, and Dr. Venter draws a sharp line between schools that pursue it seriously and those chasing enrollment growth. “There are a lot of schools that are riding the bandwagon because they see an opportunity to get students to their university in a forensic science program, but they do not really have the capacity or the infrastructure to do that. FEPAC forced those higher education institutions to have that infrastructure and people available to teach those courses for the students, so that will ensure the students are not having a degree that they cannot take anywhere, and nobody’s going to hire them.”
The third pillar comes down to facilities, and whether a program controls its own equipment or shares it with another department. “If you do not have the facilities, it’s going to be hard to be competitive,” he says. “A lot of the institutions have their forensic science program as part of the chemistry or the biology department. In our case, we are the department by ourselves. So we do not share instrumentation; we do not share facilities. If a student feels that they need a little bit more experimental experience on an equipment piece in the lab, it will be available for the student to go and utilize it.”
Kimmy Gustafson
WriterKimmy Gustafson’s expertise and passion for investigative storytelling extends to the world of forensics, where she brings a wealth of knowledge and captivating narratives to readers seeking insights into this intriguing world. She has interviewed experts on little-known topics, such as how climate crimes are investigated and prosecuted, and has written for ForensicsColleges.com since 2019.