If you’re a student, an educator or a parent, I’m sorry. The pandemic has been an ordeal for schools.
While exam time has always been tough on students, remote test-taking now often involves a new kind of pressure: special monitoring software that watches eye movements, listens for whispers and tracks online activity to ensure that students, alone with their computers, aren’t cheating. Schools want to ensure that everyone is treated fairly, and that no one is gaining an unfair advantage, but turning students’ own computers into cheat-detectors — with services such as ProctorU, Honorlock and Proctorio — is a strange and potentially distressing new normal.
Sometimes the software gets it wrong. Some students who say they were mistakenly deemed cheaters have banded together and fought back. But what happens when it is just one student? The New York Times is working on an article about how schools are handling automated reports of “suspicious” student behavior during a test. We would like to hear about your experience.
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