[c74ds]

I worked with ProctorU in a university setting. Refreshingly, our (very large, public) school did not really want to use the platform, cautioned strongly against it, and were well aware of how invasive it was. They were worried about the potential for student outrage via media channels as a result of the race-based inaccuracies and biases and other issues that were coming up in the media. Oh and ProctorU had a data breach, which students happily reminded the institution of. A very small minority of instructors insisted on using it, and that's what I was helping with.

Seeing the backend of this tool was much more worrying than being subjected to it. Simply put, the platform is SO bad, that it could not be used as evidence even in the most blatant cheating cases - for example, the screen capture feed and the webcam feed were two separate files, neither of which was time stamped. If a student had a poor or marginal connection, these two recordings would get out of sync and could never be reconciled. It was so primitive it was laughable. That's on top of the issues you'll find documented elsewhere.

[mountainofdeath]

Of course it can be used to catch cheaters. The bar is just so low that ANY suspicion is cause for sounding the alarm.

In my SO's case, they told her wearing a sleeveless shirt was "inappropriate" during an online exam and told her to put something that covers her shoulder on so she ended up wearing a sweater in 80F inside. When we reached out to their support, they said there is nothing they can do about it and rattled off some standard script.

[908B64B197]

> In my SO's case, they told her wearing a sleeveless shirt was "inappropriate" during an online exam and told her to put something that covers her shoulder

For an adult how is that not a discrimination lawsuit?

[mountainofdeath]

That's what I said. A younger, more aggressive me would have just filed a small-claims case and let their legal department figure it out.

I worked with her to try to get it escalated and at least get the test fees refunded or compensated but didn't work. She just accepted it and scheduled another exam.

[saruken]

I'd love to see a writeup/documentation on the backend issues you mentioned here. Sounds egregious! Do you have a link to point me to?

[c74ds]

I'm too intimidated to write it up publicly (though I detailed it all internally). A competitor of ProctorU, Proctorio, filed suit against a guy in a similar position to mine at a Canadian university. We're a big enough institution that others look to us for guidance, so I hope our de-facto moratorium on using these tools serves as an example.

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/02/student-surveillance-v...