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**Is Online Test-Monitoring Here to Stay?**
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A former Division 1 football player, majoring in kinesiology, Yemi-Ese had never suffered from anxiety during tests. 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. 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.
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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. "Being in sports for as long as I was, and getting yelled at by coaches, I don’t get stressed much," he said. 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.
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that may bear a previous name. Low-income students have been flagged for unsteady Wi-Fi, or for taking tests in rooms shared with family members. Students with dark skin described the software’s failure to discern their faces. Other anecdotes call attention to the biases that are built into proctoring programs. In video calls with live proctors from ProctorU, [test](http://test.com/)-takers have been forced to remove bonnets and other non-religious hair coverings—a policy that has prompted online pushback from Black women in particular—and students accessing Wi-Fi in public libraries have been ordered to take off protective masks.
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Transgender students have been outed by Proctorio’s "ID Verification" procedure, which requires that they pose for a photograph with an I.D. Jarrod Morgan, the chief strategy officer of ProctorU, told me that his company was in need of "relational" rather than technical changes. "What we will own is that we have not done a good enough job explaining what it is we do," he said. of ExamSoft, denied that his company’s product performed poorly with dark-skinned people.
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Sebastian Vos, the C.E.O. "A lot of times, there are issues that get publicly printed that are not actually issues," he said. "After I figured out nothing was going to change, I guess I got numb to it," he said. Yemi-Ese’s grades dropped precipitously early in the pandemic, a problem he attributed in large part to Proctorio. He took several tests while displaced from his home by the winter storm that devastated Texas in February, which forced him to crash with a series of friends.
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Still, he managed to raise his grades back to pre-pandemic levels, even in classes that required Proctorio. |
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