📑 What AI College Exam Proctors Are Really Teaching Our Kids

Bookmarked What AI College Exam Proctors Are Really Teaching Our Kids by Clive Thompson (WIRED)

We talk a lot about the rise of surveillance capitalism and ponder the grim future to which that Orwellian path leads. But for students? That future is now, as they try to act dutiful in front of their glowing webcams.

Clive Thompson explores the rise of proctoring software in higher education and wonders if we are teaching a whole generation to tolerate surveillance. He reports on the 900% rise in Proctorio’s use alone during the COVID crisis and suggests that this is another example of technology trying to solve an economic issue.

The rise of proctoring software is a symptom of a deeper mistake, one that we keep making in the internet age: using tech to manage a problem that is fundamentally economic.

Clive Thompson https://www.wired.com/story/ai-college-exam-proctors-surveillance/

Rather than multiple choice tests, students could be given projects or essays. However, these assessments are much more time intensive to mark.

Cory Doctorow also discusses the rise in proctoring software in light of Ian Linkletter being sued for tweeting links to training videos designed for internal use explaining how Protorio works.

High-stakes tests are garbage, pedagogically bankrupt assessment tools that act as a form of empirical facewash for “meritocracy.”

They primarily serve as a way for wealthy parents to buy good grades for their kids, since expensive test-prep services can turn even the dimmest, inbred plute into a genius-on-paper.

All of this was true before the pandemic. Now it’s worse.

https://pluralistic.net/2020/10/17/proctorio-v-linkletter/

It is interesting to consider this alongside other strategies, such as plagiarism software and cameras being used for attendance purposes. As Audrey Watters’s suggests:

We have to change the culture of schools not just adopt kinder ed-tech. We have to stop the policing of classrooms in all its forms and support other models for our digital and analog educational practices.

@hackeducation http://hackeducation.com/2020/10/06/surveillance