2,000 Parents Demand Major Academic Publisher Drop Proctorio Surveillance Tech (vice.com) 66
Digital rights group Fight for the Future has unveiled an open letter signed by 2,000 parents calling on McGraw-Hill Publishing to end its relationship with Proctorio, one of many proctoring apps that offers services that digital rights groups have called "indistinguishable from spyware." From a report: As the pandemic has pushed schooling into virtual classrooms, a host of software vendors have stepped up to offer their latest surveillance tools. Some, like Proctorio, offer technologies that claim to fight cheating by tracking head and eye movements, without any evidence that their algorithms do anything but make students anxious (and thus perform worse). Others rely on facial recognition technology, which is itself rife with racial bias, and have regularly failed to verify the identities of students of color at various points while taking state bar exams, forcing the test to end.
Proctorio is one of a few companies that has come under scrutiny from privacy groups not only for invasive surveillance, but exhaustive data extraction that collects sensitive student data including biometrics. The company is perhaps unique in its attempts to silence critics of its surveillance programs. Proctorio has deployed lawsuits to silence critics, forcing one University of British Columbia learning technology specialist to exhaust his personal and emergency savings due to a lawsuit meant to silence his online criticisms of the company. Proctorio has also targeted students and abused Twitter's DMCA takedown process to further suppress valid criticisms of its proctoring software. Further reading: Proctoring Software Company Used DMCA To Take Down a Student's Critical Tweets; and Cheating-Detection Software Provokes 'School-Surveillance Revolt'.
Proctorio is one of a few companies that has come under scrutiny from privacy groups not only for invasive surveillance, but exhaustive data extraction that collects sensitive student data including biometrics. The company is perhaps unique in its attempts to silence critics of its surveillance programs. Proctorio has deployed lawsuits to silence critics, forcing one University of British Columbia learning technology specialist to exhaust his personal and emergency savings due to a lawsuit meant to silence his online criticisms of the company. Proctorio has also targeted students and abused Twitter's DMCA takedown process to further suppress valid criticisms of its proctoring software. Further reading: Proctoring Software Company Used DMCA To Take Down a Student's Critical Tweets; and Cheating-Detection Software Provokes 'School-Surveillance Revolt'.
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Homeschooling is more popular than ever. They just might.
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With Black Jack and Hookers.
Re:Luddites (Score:5, Insightful)
If you don't like Proctorio, go start your own school.
IMO, this is an idiotic response on quite a few levels.
Better Idea (Score:3, Insightful)
If you don't like Proctorio, go start your own school.
How about if you don't like remote proctoring make sure your child does not cheat on online exams? Remote proctoring of exams is awful and is a huge invasion of privacy. However, without it I know from personal experience at university cheating runs completely out of control: we had one course with about 15% of the students in it who were caught cheating and it is likely that there were many more who were not caught.
When you have cheating that rife you have to do something otherwise the honest students
Re: Better Idea (Score:5, Interesting)
How about: design your tests in a way thaz makes cheating superfluous?
Design open-book tests, individualize questions (i.e. same structure, but different details, e.g. different numbers) etc.
Don't fuck others over just because you as a teacher are a lazy, incompetent fuck.
Re: Better Idea (Score:2)
Some will then just pay someone to take it for them.
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Tough to do that with an oral exam on zoom.
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Non STEM related classes.. most of those classes rely more on
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but its not hard to pay someone to simply take the test for you. That can work for stem classes where you have to solve the problem and it will work for the liberal arts as well. Might not scale the way other types of cheating do but certainly enables plenty of cheats.
That is why these proctoring solutions use the bio-metrics, and take video.
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There are some careers that you can probably fake it until you make it. Highly technical fields.. not so much.
If you're going to be 100% online learning for your entire school career... then I understand. Cheating for 1 year while everyone adjusts to education at home.. what good will that do when you're back in the classroom next year? If you were an average student at best and now am suddenly getting straight A's, easy to spot.
I just feel the threat of cheating a
Re: Better Idea (Score:1)
There are some careers that you can probably fake it until you make it. Highly technical fields.. not so much.
Two possibilities:
A) You're not in IT.
B) You are the PHB.
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I use open-book tests. I still use a similar, but in my opinion much more privacy protecting, product called Respondus Monitor.
One of the major ways in which students cheat today is through contract cheating. That means you hire someone to take the test for you. Graduate-level experts can be hired for relatively little money.
No amount of assessment design gets you around that problem. At some point, you need a camera in the loop to verify who is taking an assessment.
Re: Better Idea (Score:2)
Make an open problem part of your test, and once they think they have it solved, make a 10 minute oral session in which they explain their solution.
If they paid someone, they'll also have to have their solution explained to them in a way in which they'll unserstand. Essentially, the'll have to... you know... obtain the skill you were testing for.
If they do, who cares if they "cheated"? They have what it takes, so they deserve to pass.
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Make an open problem part of your test, and once they think they have it solved, make a 10 minute oral session in which they explain their solution.
If they paid someone, they'll also have to have their solution explained to them in a way in which they'll unserstand. Essentially, the'll have to... you know... obtain the skill you were testing for.
If they do, who cares if they "cheated"? They have what it takes, so they deserve to pass.
You’re making my point. To prevent contract cheating, at some point you need a camera in the loop. Whether that is synchronous or asynchronous, one-to-one or one-to-many is a function of how many students you have and how often you want to assess.
If you’re teaching graduate seminars with a comp exam, the choice set is different than if you’re teaching intro freshman courses with five exams and a final.
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To prevent contract cheating, at some point you need a camera in the loop.
It makes a huge difference if it's you & your time looking at the camera image, or if you're installing software on your student's device.
It's roughly the same difference as if a police officer writes down your license plate numbers, or if your city has AI cameras plastered all over the place.
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Make an open problem part of your test, and once they think they have it solved, make a 10 minute oral session in which they explain their solution.
Great for small, high-level courses. Not so good when you have 300 students. That's the problem: most of the alternatives only work when you can make the questions hard enough and there are few enough students that you can do an oral.
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Not so good when you have 300 students.
Then you shouldn't have 300 students. Get your school to not be such cheapskates and fucking invest in education personell. You have 300 paying students, for fuck's sake.
And besides: nobody says you should do a big exam every other week. Do one at the end of the year. Let the students know that if they're determined to have cheated in the oral exam, all their year's results will be invalidated. If they pass, multiply their result by the one of the big exam at the end of the year...
The problem is that teache
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Then you shouldn't have 300 students. Get your school to not be such cheapskates and fucking invest in education personell.
Tell that to the government. We are a university, not a school, and both the government grant and the amount we can charge for tuition is set by the government.
If we're talking about 20 year olds here: you don't even have to examinate them. Just bring them along all the way up to their final exams 4 years down the line
First, the word you are looking for is "examine", not "examinate" which you should have known if you had the level of education you are now commenting on how to get. Secondly, leaving students with no real feedback (simulations and not the same as exams and give very different results) is not going to work and will almost be guaranteed to have the
Re: Better Idea (Score:2)
I'm not a native speaker, English is my 3rd language.
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Right, because I do get paid extra to spy on children. I also jut bought 1/2 of Alaska. You know... In my dreams.
FTFY.
Have you heard of the Internet? (Score:4, Informative)
How about: design your tests in a way thaz makes cheating superfluous?
How? I realize it is easy to say that but none of what you suggest will in ANY WAY AT ALL make cheating "superfluous", although the word you are looking for is hard or impossible, since superfluous means unnecessary and it is actually learning the material that makes cheating superfluous. There are contract cheating sites out there where students can post questions and pay for someone to answer them. I can make questions hard enough in a high level course to make this unlikely to work but it is impossible to do this in intro courses where students have a much lower level of knowledge. This means there are a lot of people out there who can and will answer the questions for a suitable financial motivation. If I make the questions hard enough to stop that then the students won't be able to do them either.
Design open-book tests, individualize questions (i.e. same structure, but different details, e.g. different numbers) etc.
I've done all that - I've used the Stack system for Moodle that lets you code questions in Maxima which gives you even more flexibility to change things than just cycling variables. Heck, I'm even got students working on developing a more flexible system using Python and SageMath. None of this stops cheating because they can use contract cheating sites and once the answer is posted it is not hard to adapt it for the numbers you have.
Don't fuck others over just because you as a teacher are a lazy, incompetent fuck.
I'm not. Do you know what would be the lazy, incompetent thing to do? Exactly what you want! I could just set a test as normal, not use remote proctoring and completely ignore the rampant cheating. That's much less work than randomizing questions and setting things up in a remote proctor system. In your model the people who will, as you say, "get fucked over" when you do that will be the honest students and that is simply not acceptable to me. Indeed, the fact that you seem to be so passionately in favour of such a broken model suggests that you might be one of the ones who would benefit the most from it.
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Tests are like elections. The only way to prevent most cheating and produce believable/reliable results is for everyone to do it in person and at the same time.
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But a better solution is to realize the entire reason for them is complete BS driven by the fact that not only are the teachers lazy, incomeptent fucks, they're also cowards who think they'll die if they're in the same room a child with a sniffle.
Despite the overwhelming amount of evidence to the contrary.
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If I had my child failed a test because of some automatic system blocking, I would at first sue the company administering the test for false accusation.
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How about being a victim of false-positives? How about being bad-mouthed by some anonymous software system for no reason other than not to fit the biases of the designers of the system?
I don't think it's so much that biases are the problem. It's more like trying to use software for something it just isn't really capable of.
It's very much like claiming you have software that allows for full self driving of a vehicle, when in reality that's still out of reach.
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Re: Luddites (Score:3)
Naming is always an afterthought (Score:5, Funny)
Proc(anything) makes me think of an anal probe or colonoscopy....
Maybe it's intentional?
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Re: Naming is always an afterthought (Score:2)
No. Definitely intentional.
I'd say, Proctorio are so confident in their psychopathy, their sales presentations actually feature pictures of anal probes and telescreens, presented as "great idea, and you're the only one who disagrees, weirdo!".
I know because I had real-life-Dilbert-type meetings like that. Cocaine + gaslighting = a hell of a cocktail!
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It's certainly a good idea to connect "Proctorio surveillance" to "remember to get your colonoscopy." It's just a good health practice.
"Proctorio surveillance. Making sure nothing untoward is happening in places you otherwise couldn't see."
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Proctorio is an mix of "proctor" (to administer a test, or an administrator thereof) and "io", both a trendy TLD and a latiny ending.
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Is this happening in the public school system? (Score:4, Interesting)
If so, let's apply all the same constitutional limitations on the companies involved that we apply to the government itself. Everybody under a government contract should be under the same rules.
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Correction, in the USA schooling up to a certain age/grade is mandated by the government. You have the option to take your children out of public school and home school them or enroll them in a private school.
Correction on your correction. All of this is decided at a state level, so you can't just make blanket statements like that.
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In which states is the assertion incorrect?
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A lot of what schools do is collecting and distributing data on students. Most of it is relatively innocent, and jus
Re:Is this happening in the public school system? (Score:5, Informative)
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People who tolerate this stuff make it harder for those who object. A minor law of consequences that should be considered.
Re:Is this happening in the public school system? (Score:5, Informative)
Schools that use those should be required to provide forensics tools that monitor the proctor software and accurately report every file accessed, every file installed, every folder browsed. Background tasks should be prohibited, as they're not needed for the purpose. If they have nothing to hide that should be fine, right?
(in addition to requiring the product run as a portable application so 100% of the files can be on a USB stick that's removed when not in use)
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It was made even worse because there was a run on webcams (for obvious reasons) meaning if you didn't have one and needed one, you couldn't even go out to buy it. And the ones remaining were expensive.
This was sprung on a few college classes as well and they objected because no one could buy one, nor was the school willing to provide any.
I understand their objections but.. (Score:4, Insightful)
The reality is some kind of integrity check is needed. The reasons for testing and exams is to certify the student has done the work, paid attention to the course, read the material etc and has the some competency and familiarity with the subject.
You can't just waive that part off, without making diplomas virtually meaningless. 'oh well the cheaters will eventually be caught when they show up at work entirely incapable of ..' right well then its to late for the student. They are adult and they have largely blown their educational opportunity. They probably will get fired, and after a string of failures won't be left behind unable to reach the first run of the latter ever again. Than there is the whole 'non-traditional-diversity..' If you want anyone to take a chance on that 'barista' you need them to at least have some faith that highschool diploma means they can read and understand the instructions you e-mail them.
My first instinct is the schools should send everyone a chrome book or simlar to use for classes or at least use for exams if they want to use their personal device the rest of the time, rather then forcing them to put invasive software on their own systems. It would be better for integrity generally speaking anyway.. but that does not solve the bio metrics problems. However i also don't see what biometrics they could possibly be gathering that human proctor sitting in a room with them can't also observe and record, so what has changed? (Yes I know the answer is big data, and aggregating a lot of information in central systems that was not aggregate before, which is real concern, but a larger one than testing school kids)
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Proctorio is one of many options. It in particular has caused complaints and protests. It might be time to switch to one that has caused less problems.
Re:I understand their objections but.. (Score:4, Insightful)
Yes well the weakest security measures usually draw the fewest complaints form people that have to put up with them. That does not make them effective or even adequate.
Look what just happened at West Point - a place where you need not only great academic credentials but nomination for a somewhat rarefied group of sources to even apply. We'd nominally expect students there be more honorable than those at some State University or private college and yet...
So its not as if academic cheating isnt a real issue, and common one. It isnt as if cheaters don't invest quite a bit of effort in cheating and crooks that want to market the opportunity to cheat don't invest even more effort.
I would expect the most rigorous anti-cheating controls to draw the most complaints. Do I like dealing with MFA, SSH jump boxes, strong password requirements, etc - heck no. I really miss the way things were fifteen years ago when my ssh key just let me get on every box anyone had approved my access to but while it was easy it also means anyone who popped my laptop pwnd most of the company if the tried to move laterally. It was not good security though, if it was whoever wrote putty-rider would not have bothered.
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I note that the West Point students were not caught by Proctorio, so it must be possible to do.
Home break-ins happen, but we have not gone to a standard of steel plate walls with a vault style door. That's simply because at some point the "solution" costs more than the problem. That cost can be monetary as in my example, or it can be by preventing honest students from being able to take the exam at all or an excess of false positives in the case of Proctorio.
Consider, a drug test that always returns positiv
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The reality is some kind of integrity check is needed.
IMO, this is an answer, but to the wrong question.
The objection is not to finding a solution to cheating. That should be obvious - that, and the issue being with the specific software, the lack of transparency on how it works, and often when it is being used.
Honestly, how do so many people mange to bungle up the easily discernable difference between finding a problem with a particular approach to a problem, and taking issue with finding an issue to the problem? Not just here, but everywhere, you se
If cheating is possible at all, your education is (Score:5, Interesting)
Our teacher used to write all the answers on the blackboard, and grade our explanations and problem solving skilks.
This meant that copying from somebody else was equal to managing to understand it yourself. You had to get it, to be able to make it look like yours.
Turns out kids weren't actually stupid. The teaching was just shit.
Best teacher I ever had.
By the way, here's a small list of YouTube channels that are on a Feynman level of explaining:
* PBS SpaceTime
* 3blue1brown
* ScienceClic English
*Please*, if you know more channels like that, share them here.
science videos (Score:2)
Neil DeGrasse Tyson's StarTalk: https://www.youtube.com/c/Star... [youtube.com]
Dr Don's Subatomic Stories at Fermilab: https://www.youtube.com/user/f... [youtube.com]
Sabine Hossenfelder: https://www.youtube.com/c/Sabi... [youtube.com]
Logical result of Covid panic (Score:1, Interesting)
If people weren't completely paranoid over Covid this could resolve the problem quickly and fairly.
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Mainly because staggered testing windows gives opportunity for students to talk among themselves about what the questions on the test were between groups. Each group would need a unique test which could be quite the burden on the teaching staff to develop and grade. Doable, but a lot more work.
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The easiest problems to solve are the ones that only exist because you created them. Once you realize a problem doesn't actually exist, solving it becomes infinitely easier.
2000 parents is pretty much zero (Score:3)
This is a small campaign when you take into account the number of people using Google the software.
Great name (Score:3)
Humans cheat because it works. (Score:2)
They go to school to obtain credentials. Human nature is pragmatically evil so people require a system of reward and punishment to behave themselves and that can never be different at scale.
Test on-site taking adequate precautions. It really is that simple. The idea we should trust each other is not sane, not merely a tad irrational. Those not wanting school districts to inflict Proctorio on students should lobby their school boards. Parents are customers and voters, and most school boards are elected.
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In that you have to do absolutely nothing more than what you did before China shat on the world.