I don’t object to using ProctorU, but Cory’s “paranoid fantasies” made me re-evaluate my use of it and weigh it against my convenience. Which I hadn’t done before.
Additionally, I don’t think the Lower Marion School District, the Bundestrojaner and Aaron’s Rent-To-Own spyware are paranoid fantasies, since they actually happened…
Have you not been paying attention the last couple of years? We already know ProctologyU is recording and storing a ton of personal information. Is it reasonable to assume that information is not being re-used for unconsented purposes? Is it reasonable to assume that ProctologyU’s software and systems are secure? Is it reasonable to assume that all of ProctologyU’s proctologists are above board?
I think it’s reasonable to assume that the information is being used according to whatever their Terms of Service and Privacy Policy, and I think it is reasonable to assume that their software and services are about as secure as other websites. I think it’s reasonable to assume that they take reasonable precautions to reduce their liability by screening their proctors. If you have any bit of evidence that ProctorU is misusing information, that their software and systems are insecure, please share! As it stands now, I don’t particularly like using ProctorU. If it turns out they’re actually or evil or incompetent, I would like to complain to my school to terminate their relationship with ProctorU in favor of some other solution.
I see this:
“What we look for is eye movement,” says Ms. Schnorr. “When the eyes start veering off to the side, that’s clearly a red flag.”
and this:
Even slight oddities of behavior often lead to “incident reports,” which the companies supply to colleges along with recordings of the suspicious behavior.
and this:
The company’s subcontractor in India, Sameva Global, said it notes “minor suspicions” in 50 percent of exams; “intermediate” suspicions in 20 to 30 percent; and “major” incidents in 2 to 5 percent.
and I think that this company is mostly concerned with manufacturing false positives. A substantial proportion of college students are nervous and fidgety during exams — probably because its an exam. Telling me that 50 percent of students might have cheated is basically useless.
So, to recap: Sitting in a classroom taking a test under the watchful gaze of a proctor? Par for the course.
Sitting at home taking a test under the watchful gaze of a proctor, via your computer? “…A serious privacy violation…going too far…surveillance of sorts.”
The solution to that problem seems pretty simple: don’t allow for at-home testing. Too bad that might mean fewer available classes. Either way, it looks like the article’s Mr. Nguyen is going to have something to complain about.
The irony is that the university proctors tests because they don’t trust the students, and the students don’t want to use the software because they don’t trust the companies doing the proctoring.
Just wait until the new version comes out. My university is beta-testing it. In addition to all the current features, test-takers are now required to provide urine, stool, and either semen or a remotely-administered pap smear. Of course, to maintain the integrity of the test, these samples have to be provided while in full view of the webcam. It’s really convenient. You buy a peripheral that connects via USB and it analyzes the samples in real time while you take the test.
If you’ve used ProctorU, did you sign a FERPA waiver? A lot of this educational spyware treads dangerously close to the line of violation IMO, and I’m curious if the schools and companies involved have been properly dotting i’s and crossing t’s.
That doesn’t follow at all. It’s a simple matter of logistics, and administrators getting off their butts. There’s a crapton of places that exams can be sat at. All that’s required is making use of them.
I suspect that ProctologyU’s service is more expensive than meatspace proctors, too. In my experience, sitting exams in a hall with … I don’t know? 200 other students, doing a dozen or more seperate subjects, requires the diligent attendence of about 10 proctors, or in a smaller classroom with maybe 40 students there’s 3 or 4 proctors. That’s one for each 10-20 students. There’s also no additional cost to students, which is good given how high course costs are already.
ProctologyU, on the other hand, require a proctor for every 3-6 students (FTFA), making the tech solution only a third as efficient, and the students have to stump up $20 a throw for the “privilege”. I wonder if that’s the point? By doing it this way the Universitys can offload the cost of a service - which the students have already paid for - back onto the students, by making it a “course requirement.” Which equals more coin for the university.
I can understand needing to monitor students during exams. I have no problem with that, so long as the proctoring company is willing to state exactly what they’ll be monitoring and agree that they will not permanently install any software on my machine and will remove all residue of their monitoring after the exam is completed. I figure that’s reasonable, if they’re in the business of just proctoring exams they won’t need anything beyond that and if they need anything beyond that then me and whoever’s giving the course need to have a little discussion about what the proctors are doing beyond just proctoring the exam and what responsibility the course presenter’s going to take for that (I’m assuming whoever’s presenting the course isn’t dumb enough to let the students choose their own proctoring company, because that’s just so open to abuse…).
What I don’t understand is why, at this level, there’s such an emphasis on ensuring students do not have the basic reference materials available that they’d have available in all normal circumstances? To me it seems like another manifestation of something that caused another completely nonsensical problem when I was in college: we were expected to not use techniques and knowledge we’d been taught in the course immediately preceding this one. It’s like the instructors expect us to not have learned anything in several years of college, or at least to act as if we haven’t, and here I thought the whole point of college was to learn?
Design the tests to test understanding. It’s not that hard (well, unless you don’t understand the material yourself, then good luck with that). I had instructors in college who did that: it didn’t matter if you brought the book because the questions weren’t in the book, and if you didn’t know the concepts and had to depend on scanning the book looking for the section that had the right information you weren’t going to finish half the exam in the time allotted. If you knew the concepts and understood the material, having to look up the exact formulas wasn’t an issue because in the real world you’d have the books on the shelf and would do just that anyway, and if you didn’t know the concepts and understand the material well enough to look at a problem and know what formulas you needed to look up you were going to fail no matter how many books and notes you had available.
So on point. Nicely done.
It is naive to think that cheating is not rampant in education generally, and online education particularly. A service like this seems like a great thing for people who care about the integrity of online learning. Also, not really “spyware” or “secret” since it’s clearly explained to the user.
So much paranoia, this sounds like those people who don’t want their address or phone number listed anywhere - yet if you own property I can pull up a detail report of your address and how much you paid for it.
It’s only reasonable to assume that information is being used in an unconsented way if they have a reasonable way of making it profitable. I doubt they are running some kind of OCR software to capture your driver license info, especially when it’s likely they could get most of that information directly from the school. As for the rest of what is recorded what importance is it? The only way I see this is bad is if it has rootkit potential.
ProctorU doesn’t preclude individual professors from assigning open-book exams. Each individual professor sets the specifications for each. This, of course, means that the proctor has 6 different students, all taking different exams, all with slightly different specs, making things…interesting. I still think it’s a silly thing, but there is that flexibility.
I agree completely that test should be more robust and concept-understanding oriented. Need a standardized knowledge-memorization test, such as for medical personnell? Proctor that shit live. Instead instructors from online universities seem to tip toward “I’ll give them SO MANY questions, that they won’t have time to look them all up!!” but that’s just the machine gun in the arms race, and only makes cheating that much more necessary to get up on that cuuuurve.
Some of the 2nd-3rd year math courses I took in university (I want to say it was calculus, but may have been algebra or combinatorics) allowed us to bring in a single page cheat sheet with formulas and the like. The idea was that we weren’t there to memorize formulas, which can easily be looked up, but rather to learn the concepts BEHIND the formulas and how to apply them to solve problems. Just memorizing the formulas themselves wasn’t a very useful thing to teach us, and they recognized that.
You can tailor an exam to make cheating irrelevant, but you cannot determine that the person taking the exam is the person enrolled in the course and receiving credit for it on a transcript without some sort of visual confirmation, such as the ID check ProctorU does at the start of a test.
I agree an opt-out should be offered. In my courses, ProctorU is one of the opt-outs. I offer m exams on campus. People who are are unable to come for whatever reason can use ProctorU, or take the exam at another proctored site.
And the way ProctorU is verifying that is not sufficient to thwart a a bad actor of even moderate ability and/or motivation.
@JonS
I agree that most learning these days is just going through the motions to acquire a piece of paper. Certainly in such a situation the cheater may not be cheating themselves (at least not fiscally or job wise) but they are still missing out if the education itself carries any real value, and that was my point.
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