Is Online Test-Monitoring Here to Stay?
More recently, several students in Illinois have sued their institutions for using the software, alleging that it violates their rights under a state law that protects the privacy of residents’ biometric data. On December 3rd, six U.S. senators sent letters to Proctorio, ProctorU, and ExamSoft, requesting information about “the steps that your company has taken to protect the civil rights of students,” and proof that their programs securely guard the data they collect, “such as images of [a student’s] home, photos of their identification, and personal information regarding their disabilities.” (Proctorio wrote a long letter in response, defending its practices.) On December 9th, the nonprofit Electronic Privacy Information Center submitted a complaint to the attorney general of D.C.against five proctoring companies, arguing that they illegally collect students’ personal data. (The situation, in addition to its other challenges, deprived him of his usual light setup.) By the end of his senior year, Yemi-Ese was still struggling to get admitted to every Proctorio exam. Yemi-Ese’s grades dropped precipitously early in the pandemic, a problem he attributed in large part to Proctorio. He took several tests while displaced from his home by the winter storm that devastated Texas in February, which forced him to crash with a series of friends.
Still, he managed to raise his grades back to pre-pandemic levels, even in classes that required Proctorio. “After I figured out nothing was going to change, I guess I got numb to it,” he said. The surge in online-proctoring services has launched a wave of complaints. A letter of protest addressed to the CUNY administration has nearly thirty thousand signatures. Excuse me ma’am, I was having a full on breakdown mid test and kept pulling tissues.” Another protested, “i was doing so well till i got an instagram notification on my laptop and i tried to x it out AND I GOT FUCKING KICKED OUT.” A third described getting an urgent text from a parent in the middle of an exam and calling back—”on speaker phone so my prof would know I wasn’t cheating”—to find out that a family member had died.
“Now proctorio has a video of me crying,” the student wrote. One student tweeted, “professor just emailed me asking why i had the highest flag from proctorio. Anti-online-proctoring Twitter accounts popped up, such as @Procteario and @ProcterrorU. Proctorio, which operates as a browser plug-in, can detect whether your gaze is pointed at the camera; it tracks how often you look away from the screen, how much you type, and how often you move the mouse. At the end of the exam, the professor receives a report on each student’s over-all “suspicion score,” along with a list of moments, marked for an instructor to review, when the software judged that cheating might have occurred.
It compares your rate of activity to a class average that the software calculates as the exam unfolds, flagging you if you deviate too much from the norm.
