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.
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.
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.
One thing that’s not sufficiently recognized is that people – and kids especially – are always learning, and they learn from everything. This means that they’re learning a lot from the non-curricular aspects of education, including in this case AI-based exam proctoring. Like, for example, the AI that basically told a student to stop slouching; “Unsettled, she began to stare more robotically at her screen.” Clive Thompson argues that it sets a scary civic precedent. “We are indoctrinating our youth to think that this is normal, says Lindsay Oliver, activism project manager at the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Students trained to accept digital surveillance may well be less likely to rebel against spyware deployed by their bosses at work or by abusive partners.” We don’t know if that’s what they’re actually learning, exactly – they might be learning that society doesn’t trust them, or any number of things. But that’s the problem. Via Aaron Davis.