Is Online Test-Monitoring Here to Stay?

Is Online Test-Monitoring Here to Stay?

Sebastian Vos, the C.E.O. "A lot of times, there are issues that get publicly printed that are not actually issues," he said. Jarrod Morgan, the chief strategy officer of ProctorU, told me that his company was in need of "relational" rather than technical changes. of ExamSoft, denied that his company’s product performed poorly with dark-skinned people. "What we will own is that we have not done a good enough job explaining what it is we do," he said.

The first time Yemi-Ese opened the application, positioning himself in front of his laptop for a photo, to confirm that his Webcam was working, Proctorio claimed that it could not detect a face in the image, and refused to let him into his exam. "Being in sports for as long as I was, and getting yelled at by coaches, I don’t get stressed much," he said. He was initially unconcerned when he learned that several of his classes, including a course in life-span development and another in exercise physiology, would be administering exams using Proctorio, a software program that monitors test-takers for possible signs of cheating.

When the coronavirus pandemic began, Femi Yemi-Ese, then a junior at the University of Texas at Austin, began attending class and taking exams remotely, from the apartment that he shared with roommates in the city. Yemi-Ese turned on more lights and tilted his camera to catch his face at its most illuminated angle; it took several tries before the software approved him to begin. A former Division 1 football player, majoring in kinesiology, Yemi-Ese had never suffered from anxiety during tests.

Despite these preparations, "I know that I’m going to have to try a couple times before the camera recognizes me," he said. When we first spoke, last November, he told me that, in seven exams he’d taken using Proctorio, he had never once been let into a test on his first attempt. Adding sources of light seems to help, but it comes with consequences. Like many test-takers of color, Yemi-Ese, who is Black, has spent the past three semesters using software that reliably struggles to locate his face.

Now, whenever he sits down to take an exam using Proctorio, he turns on every light in his bedroom, and positions a ring light behind his computer so that it shines directly into his eyes. "That’s hard when you’re actively trying not to look away, which could make it look like you’re cheating." "I have a light beaming into my eyes for the entire exam," he said. (In a survey of college instructors conducted early in the pandemic, ninety-three per cent expressed concern that students would be more likely to cheat on online exams.) Some of these companies offer live proctoring underwritten by artificial intelligence.

Fully algorithmic test-monitoring—which is less expensive, and available from companies including Proctorio, ExamSoft, and Respondus Monitor—has expanded even faster. When college campuses shut down in March, 2020, remote-proctoring companies such as Proctorio, ProctorU, Examity, and ExamSoft benefitted immediately.