Paranoia about cheating is making online education terrible for everyone
A sudden switch to online learning reveals a slew of challenges for educators.
When student Marium Raza learned that her online biochemistry exam at the University of Washington would have a digital proctor, she wanted to do her research. The system, provided by a service called Proctorio, would rely on artificial intelligence and a webcam to monitor her while she worked. In other words, as tests must happen remotely in the Covid-19 crisis, Raza’s school is one of many using a mixture of robots and video feeds to make sure students don’t cheat.
“We don’t have any transparency about how our recorded video is going to be used or who is going to see it,” Raza told Recode. “The status quo should not be visualizing each student as someone who is trying to cheat in any way possible.”
Raza wasn’t the only one in her class who felt concerned about new levels of surveillance. Another student in the class, who did not want to be named, said that in addition to privacy worries, they were concerned that they didn’t even have enough RAM to run the Proctorio software. Worse, the tool’s facial detection algorithm seemed to struggle to recognize them, so they needed to sit in the full light of the window to better expose the contours of their face, in their view an indication that the system might be biased.
When a practice run with the software ultimately failed, Raza said students took the exam online without Proctorio’s monitoring. Given the remote instruction required by the Covid-19 crisis, the University of Washington had signed a six-month contract with Proctorio only CONTINUE READING: Distance learning during the coronavirus pandemic is changing cheating - Vox