Proctoring Software: Accessible or Invasive?

The rise of various education-based technical programs and the convenience of virtual learning may streamline processes for teachers, staff and their institutions, but at what cost to the students? Zoom call lectures and monitoring cameras are often deemed beneficial for remote students, but they may also lead to growing security and privacy concerns about invasive proctoring. 

Thirty-eight states approved permanent virtual learning schools after the COVID-19 pandemic led to increased interest in at-home learning. RAND Corporation’s 2021 survey of 291 U.S. school districts found a surge in the number that offered virtual schools for students after the height of the pandemic. Approximately 26% of those 291 districts offered remote lessons as a full-time option last year, compared with 3% before the pandemic.

Online exam proctoring also became popular during the pandemic. Many universities adopted the technology in conjunction with exam-related policies and regulations designed to promote honest testing practices and quell student cheating.

Invasion of Privacy

As Americans’ concerns for monitoring software and government surveillance have grown, higher ed institutions may not have considered all the unforeseen consequences for students—and their relationships with their professors. In August 2022, this issue was taken to the national stage when a federal court sided in favor of Cleveland State University student Aaron Ogletre, who sued the university for requiring him to submit to an Honorlock room scan before his exam, finding the scan violated his Fourth Amendment right to privacy.

Honorlock is an internationally used proctoring software that, among other features, scans students’ rooms using webcams to monitor the surroundings before and during exams. The Honorlock program is easily integrated into virtual classrooms such as Canva and Blackboard. The program launches when the student is ready to test, beginning with the Honorlock authentication process; the student takes a selfie and shows their official identification card, before the program scans the room. Honorlock records the student’s exam session by webcam, as well as records the student’s screen. Honorlock’s remote proctoring software can detect cell phone, tablet and laptop use while a student is taking the exam.

Ogletree sued his university, alleging that the room scan violated Fourth Amendment rights protecting U.S. citizens against “unreasonable searches and seizures.” U.S. district court Judge J. Philip Calabrese on Monday, August 22, 2022, decided in Ogletree’s favor: Room scans are unconstitutional. In defense, Cleveland State argued that room scans are not “searches” because they are limited in scope, conducted to ensure academic fairness and exam integrity and not coerced.

“Mr. Ogletree’s privacy interest in his home outweighs Cleveland State’s interests in scanning his room,” Judge Calabrese said when delivering his verdict. “Accordingly, the Court determines that Cleveland State’s practice of conducting room scans is unreasonable under the Fourth Amendment. Rooms scans go where people otherwise would not, at least not without a warrant or an invitation.” 

Honor Code Integrity

Each of Honorlock’s current 300 partner institutions has the freedom to set unique parameters and restrictions and to determine the robustness of the proctoring experience. Some schools, for example, only proctor major exams—such as midterms and finals—leaving the rest to the honor code. Although honor codes are not tangible measurements for schools to ensure their students’ honesty, these policies are often considered a fundamental step to establishing an institution’s culture of academic integrity. 

According to the University of Wisconsin-Madison, one of the hundreds of American universities implementing this software, “Honorlock helps instructors create a responsible, fair test-taking environment online, where students can demonstrate their own independent learning. Yet instructors still retain responsibility for reviewing students taking the quiz or exam, setting parameters for the test-taking environment and determining when academic misconduct occurs, as they would in an in-person classroom. Only instructors review the information captured during an exam or assessment.”

It all comes down to an institution’s values, what it wants to prioritize, and the message it wants to broadcast to the world—and its students. Is the purpose of a college or university to carry out its examinations with the highest academic integrity by any means necessary? Is having no cheaters the goal? Or, is the purpose of an institution to provide a home for their students and to create a comfortable environment where students can feel safe, trusted and empowered? Is it somewhere in between? 

“The balance between trust and due diligence is a difficult one, and we recognize there are trade-offs with any such decision,” said the University of Wisconsin-Madison in a public statement. “We also must recognize that the online environment, without any proctoring whatsoever, presents challenges that could prove detrimental to academic integrity and ensuring a fair academic evaluation for all students.”

According to the university, “In a typical year, the Honor Council receives approximately 50 reports of academic integrity violations illustrating that incidents do occur. The university, therefore, believes that employing reasonable measures to protect academic integrity benefits students and meets our responsibility for basic due diligence.”

Decreasing Use

On the other hand, many institutions have already begun to loosen restrictions on their existing proctoring software or are eliminating such measures. In 2021, the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign indicated it would discontinue its use of remote-proctoring software Proctorio after its summer 2021 term. According to a press release from the university, the decision followed “almost a year of outcry over the service, both on UIUC’s campus and around the US, citing concerns with privacy, discrimination and accessibility.” 

Additionally, in 2020, the Electronic Frontier Foundation reported that students at the University of Texas at Dallas petitioned the school to stop using Honorlock. Florida International University students also requested the school stop using Honorlock. According to the foundation, Honorlock collects a considerable amount of data which the company keeps for up to a year and, in some cases, two years. California State University Fullerton students also petitioned for removing Proctorio, calling it “creepy and unacceptable” that students could be filmed in their homes while taking exams. 

Ogletree’s case appears to represent the frustrations of thousands of American students.  Students expect a certain amount of trust and respect from their higher education leadership, a continuation of the trust they exhibited when they enrolled as students and paid tuition.

“The binary subjectification of students as cheaters and the cheated has degraded the value of student engagement in university education whilst creating more competitive and distrusting relationships amongst students and between students and teachers,” said researchers Kynungmee Lee and Mik Fanguy in a recent British Journal of Education Technology article. “Nevertheless, without challenging the unethical consequences of online proctoring technologies or fundamentally unfair social and educational systems, students willingly accept and adopt them as docile bodies, which has led to educational deterioration rather than innovation.”