Nuked University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign will discontinue its use of remote-proctoring software proctorio. The decision follows a year of outcry over the service, citing concerns with privacy, discrimination, and accessibility.
Proctorio is one of the most prominent software platforms that college and universities use to watch for cheating on remote tests. It flags’suspicious signs’ to professors, who can review its recordings. The platform also enables professors to track the websites students visit during their exams, and bar them from functions like copy or pasting and printing.
Covid-19 drove schools around the US to move a bulk of their instruction online. Students and instructors have spoken out against the widespread use of the software.
The campus is’investigating longer-term remote proctoring options’. Students who continue to use proctorio through the summer 2021 term are’expected to accommodate students that raise accessibility issues’.
Over 1,000 people signed a petition calling on the university to stop using the service. The university now operates with a hybrid of online and in-person instruction.
The University of Regina is one of many campuses where remote proctoring has faced backlash. Over 3,500 signatories have called on the university to end its use of proctortrack.
The electronic privacy information center filed a complaint against proctorio, claiming that the services’ collection of personal information amounts to’unfair and deceptive trade practices’. Even us senators have gotten involved.
The complaints mostly revolve around security and privacy. proctorio’s recordings give instructor and the service access to some of test-takers’ browsing data.
Students have reported not having access to a webcam at home, or enough bandwidth to accommodate the service. One test-taker told the verge that she had to take her first chemistry test in a Starbucks parking lot last semester.
Research has found that even the best facial-recognition algorithms make more errors in identifying black faces than they do identifying white ones. proctorio stated in its response that’all of these cases were due to issues relating to lighting, webcam position, or webcam quality, not race’.
As the program is phased out, and indicates that accessibility will be considered in the selection of the next remote-proctoring solution.
