The onset of the COVID-19 pandemic changed the landscape of education and led to increased usage of remote proctoring tools that are designed to monitor students when they take assessments outside the classroom. While prior work has explored students' privacy and security concerns regarding online proctoring tools, the perspective of educators is under explored. Notably, educators are the decision makers in the classrooms and choose which remote proctoring services and the level of observations they deem appropriate. To explore how educators balance the security and privacy of their students with the requirements of remote exams, we sent survey requests to over 3,400 instructors at a large private university that taught online classes during the 2020/21 academic year. We had n=125 responses: 21% of the educators surveyed used online exam proctoring services during the remote learning period, and of those, 35% plan to continue using the tools even when there is a full return to in-person learning. Educators who use exam proctoring services are often comfortable with their monitoring capabilities. However, educators are concerned about students sharing certain types of information with exam proctoring companies, particularly when proctoring services collect identifiable information to validate students' identities. Our results suggest that many educators developed alternative assessments that did not require online proctoring and that those who did use online proctoring services often considered the tradeoffs between the potential risks to student privacy and the utility or necessity of exam proctoring services.
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Examining the Examiners: Students' Privacy and Security Perceptions of Online Proctoring Services
In response to the Covid-19 pandemic, educational institutions quickly transitioned to remote learning. The problem of how to perform student assessment in an online environment has become increasingly relevant, leading many institutions and educators to turn to online proctoring services to administer remote exams. These services employ various student monitoring methods to curb cheating, including restricted ("lockdown") browser modes, video/screen monitoring, local network traffic analysis, and eye tracking. In this paper, we explore the security and privacy perceptions of the student test-takers being proctored. We analyze user reviews of proctoring services' browser extensions and subsequently perform an online survey (n=102). Our findings indicate that participants are concerned about both the amount and the personal nature of the information shared with the exam proctoring companies. However, many participants also recognize a trade-off between pandemic safety concerns and the arguably invasive means by which proctoring services ensure exam integrity. Our findings also suggest that institutional power dynamics and students' trust in their institutions may dissuade students' opposition to remote proctoring.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1718498
- NSF-PAR ID:
- 10304307
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Proceedings of the Seventeenth Symposium on Usable Privacy and Security
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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Abstract Efforts to discourage academic misconduct in online learning environments frequently include the use of remote proctoring services. While these services are relatively commonplace in undergraduate science courses, there are open questions about students’ remote assessment environments and their concerns related to remote proctoring services. Using a survey distributed to 11 undergraduate science courses engaging in remote instruction at three American, public, research-focused institutions during the spring of 2021, we found that the majority of undergraduate students reported testing in suboptimal environments. Students’ concerns about remote proctoring services were closely tied to technological difficulties, fear of being wrongfully accused of cheating, and negative impacts on mental health. Our results suggest that remote proctoring services can create and perpetuate inequitable assessment environments for students, and additional research is required to understand the efficacy of their intended purpose to prevent cheating. We also advocate for continued conversations about the broader social and institutional conditions that can pressure students into cheating. While changes to academic culture are difficult, these conversations are necessary for higher education to remain relevant in an increasingly technological world.
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null (Ed.)ABSTRACT Because of the COVID-19 pandemic in March 2020, higher education institutions had to pivot rapidly to online remote learning. Many educators were concerned that the disparate impact of this crisis would exacerbate inequities in learning outcomes and student learning experiences, especially for students from minoritized backgrounds. We examined course grades and student perceptions of their learning experiences in fall (face-to-face) and spring (fully remote) quarters in an introductory biology course series at a public research university. Contrary to our hypothesis, we found that student course grades increased overall during remote learning, and equity gaps in course grades were mitigated for minoritized students. We hypothesize that instructors may have changed their grading practices to compensate for challenges in remote learning in crisis. However, spring students reported significant decreases in the amount of peer negotiation and social support, critical components of active learning. These findings suggest that remote teaching in crisis may have negatively affected student learning environments in ways that may not have been captured by grading practices.more » « less
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ABSTRACT The article documents students’ experiences with the shift online at the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic and provides informed recommendations to STEM instructors regarding academic integrity and student stress. Over 500 students were surveyed on these topics, including an open-ended question. Students experienced more stress and perceived a greater workload in online courses and therefore preferred in-person courses overall. Personal awareness of cheating during online exams is positively correlated with the proportion of cheating a student perceives. Fear of getting caught is the best cheating deterrent while getting a better grade makes cheating most enticing. Randomization of questions and answer choices is perceived as a highly effective tool to reduce cheating and is reported as the least stress-inducing method. Inability to backtrack and time limits cause students the most stress. Students report that multiple choice questions are the least effective question type to discourage cheating and oral exam questions cause the most stress. Use of camera and lockdown browser or being video- and audio- recorded caused the majority of student stress. Yet, nearly 60% agree that the combination of camera and lockdown browser is an effective deterrent. Recommendations: (i) Be transparent regarding academic dishonesty detection methods and penalties. (ii) Use online invigilating tools. (iii) Synchronize exams and (iv) randomize exam questions. (v) Allow backtracking. (vi) Avoid converting in-person exams to online exams; instead, explore new ways of designing exams for the online environment.more » « less
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null (Ed.)Proctoring educational assessments (e.g., quizzes and exams) has a cost, be it in faculty (and/or course staff) time or in money to pay for proctoring services. Previous estimates of the utility of proctoring (generally by estimating the score advantage of taking an exam without proctoring) vary widely and have mostly been implemented using an across subjects experimental designs and sometimes with low statistical power. We investigated the score advantage of unproctored exams versus proctored exams using a within-subjects design for N = 510 students in an on-campus introductory programming course with 5 proctored exams and 4 unproctored exams. We found that students scored 3.32 percentage points higher on questions on unproctored exams than on proctored exams (p < 0.001). More interestingly, however, we discovered that this score advantage on unproctored exams grew steadily as the semester progressed, from around 0 percentage points at the start of semester to around 7 percentage points by the end. As the most obvious explanation for this advantage is cheating, we refer to this behavior as the student population "learning to cheat". The data suggests that both more individuals are cheating and the average benefit of cheating is increasing over the course of the semester. Furthermore, we observed that studying for unproctored exams decreased over the course of the semester while studying for proctored exams stayed constant. Lastly, we estimated the score advantage by question type and found that our long-form programming questions had the highest score advantage on unproctored exams, but there are multiple possible explanations for this finding.more » « less
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