| Hi there, I'm the person who extracted the algo and ran the original test. I picked my words mostly in response to the "fewer than five complaints ... due to race" statement Proctorio included in a response letter to the US senate[0] (page 21, para 3/4). If they did not make those claims, I would not have used the word "racist" in my original blog post, instead opting for a more neutral term like "biased". How the press chose to represent my work is their editorial choice. > How is it affecting students? ... Here's some insight into how Proctorio works - when your exam time window opens, you need to start this set of "pre-exam checks" - which take nearly a minute or two to run through in several cases, more on slower computers. Once that's done, it runs a "test" of their facerec - if it cannot see your face, you cannot enter the exam. No easy professor override, no "professor can review the recording". Only options are to either shine a bright light on your face or something for it to see you, if that works, or have a conversation with customer support that essentially goes "this algorithm literally doesn't see me as a human". Also remember that all this is going down when the time is ticking down on the exam - most exams are only open for the time slot set for them - if you start late because you're fighting a phone/chat tree (sometimes with wait times of 5+ minutes, from anecdotes from friends) or a facerec algo, that's time counting against you. And there's also the stress of having to write an exam on top of all that. So yeah, students are definitely affected by it. [0]: https://epic.org/privacy/dccppa/online-test-proctoring/Proct... |
>Only options are to either shine a bright light on your face or something for it to see you
So what this is really measuring is the percentage of students who try to get out of taking the test by turning off most of the lights in their room and telling the teacher the computer wouldn't let them take the test. I would love to hear what the company that designed the test has to say about its performance. I doubt it failed to recognize faces when they tested it in proper lighting as just detecting that a face is present is extremely easy for a computer to do.