Something About Company

Is Online Test-Monitoring Here to Stay?

Low-income students have been flagged for unsteady Wi-Fi, or for taking tests in rooms shared with family members. Students with dark skin described the software’s failure to discern their faces. Transgender students have been outed by Proctorio’s “ID Verification” procedure, which requires that they pose for a photograph with an I.D. that may bear a previous name. In video calls with live proctors from ProctorU, test-takers have been forced to remove bonnets and other non-religious hair coverings—a policy that has prompted online pushback from Black women in particular—and students accessing Wi-Fi in public libraries have been ordered to take off protective masks.

Other anecdotes call attention to the biases that are built into proctoring programs. “What we will own is that we have not done a good enough job explaining what it is we do,” he said. Sebastian Vos, the C.E.O. Jarrod Morgan, the chief strategy officer of ProctorU, told me that his company was in need of “relational” rather than technical changes. of ExamSoft, denied that his company’s product performed poorly with dark-skinned people.

“A lot of times, there are issues that get publicly printed that are not actually issues,” he said. Adding sources of light seems to help, but it comes with consequences. When we first spoke, last November, he told me that, in seven exams he’d taken using Proctorio, he had never once been let into a test on his first attempt. Despite these preparations, “I know that I’m going to have to try a couple times before the camera recognizes me,” he said.

Like many test-takers of color, Yemi-Ese, who is Black, has spent the past three semesters using software that reliably struggles to locate his face. “I have a light beaming into my eyes for the entire exam,” he said. Now, whenever he sits down to take an exam using Proctorio, he turns on every light in his bedroom, and positions a ring light behind his computer so that it shines directly into his eyes. “That’s hard when you’re actively trying not to look away, which could make it look like you’re cheating.” But some universities “have signed multi-year contracts that opened the door to proctoring in a way that they won’t just be able to pull themselves out of,” Jesse Stommel, a researcher who studies education technology and the editor of the journal Hybrid Pedagogy, said.

Meanwhile, rising vaccination rates and schools’ plans to reopen in the fall might seem to obviate the need for proctoring software. Several institutions, including Harvard, Stanford, McGill, and the University of California, Berkeley, have either banned proctoring technology or strongly discouraged its use. (Harvard urged faculty to move toward open-book exams during the pandemic; if professors felt the need to monitor students, the university suggested observing them in Zoom breakout rooms.) Since last summer, several prominent universities that had signed contracts with Proctorio, including the University of Washington and Baylor University, have announced decisions either to cancel or not to renew those contracts.

“They have committed to paying for these services for a long time, and, once you’ve made a decision like that, you rationalize using the software.

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