After a long day jam-packed with classes and meetings, junior psychology major Meredith Brown sat down in the computer lab in the JD Williams Library to take her social psychology exam on Proctorio. What Brown didn’t expect was to fall asleep just a few minutes after starting. When she woke up, she felt disoriented and confused as to why she was in a computer lab.
“It struck me: I was in the midst of taking a 100-point exam, and there was only one minute remaining with nearly 40 questions still left to answer,” Brown said. “I entered full panic-mode and began filling in as many bubbles as I could without thinking too deeply about my responses in desperation to finish. It felt like a college student’s worst nightmare.”
An issue Brown realized after the fact is that the proctor on Proctorio either couldn’t or didn’t wake her up while she was sleeping through her exam.
“My proctor was watching me and could talk to me, but I never heard him try to wake me up. I may have slept through him trying to talk to me, but I never heard anything from him,” Brown said.
The university decided to use the Google Chrome extension Proctorio in March as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic. Teachers previously used the testing lab in the Jackson Avenue Center and ProctorU, but with ProctorU unable to scale their service to meet the demand from many universities going online at the same time, Proctorio was the best decision for UM.
According to Brian Hopkins, the deputy chief information officer for academic technology, the university paid $182,790 for a license that allows unlimited tests and test takers from March 17 this year to March 16, 2021. The Division of Outreach paid for this, not increasing any fees charged to students.
While Proctorio was used for last semester, students have raised concerns about the testing platform for multiple reasons, from violating privacy to crashing constantly. Senior exercise science major Kelby Howell said that when she was taking exams at home in the spring, Proctorio would crash fairly often.
“My hometown still does not have broadband internet, so it is extremely hard to complete school work from home,” Howell said. “The service crashed frequently during my tests, and I would always have to reach out to my professors and get them to reset it, praying it wouldn’t happen a second time.”
Howell said another issue she had with Proctorio was data storage. She said when she was looking into how long Proctorio held onto student information, she couldn’t find an answer, which concerned her.
According to Proctorio’s privacy policy, “all student records obtained by Proctorio from an institution are the property of and are under control of that institution.” According to the UM Policy on Grade Appeal, faculty members are required to hold onto grade-related materials — including data from Proctorio — until the end of the next semester.
“For instructional data, which would include Proctorio data, the basic idea is that data should not be deleted until we’re quite sure there will be no business purpose for looking at/for this data,” Hopkins wrote in an email. “For instance, UM policy allows students to appeal grades after the term ends and grades are posted. Data from Proctorio may be needed during this appeal process and so must be retained.”
Junior Spencer Johns said that he feels like his privacy is violated when he uses Proctorio, given that he’s required to show the proctor his entire room and also give access to keylogs, which can be used to obtain sensitive information such as passwords or private messages.
“While Orwell must be tired of having his name invoked, being required to install software which records you in your private residence does ring of Big Brother’s normalization,” Johns said.
Charles Fleming, an assistant professor of computer and information science, said that while he does not believe Proctorio to be an invasion of privacy and considers it a safe plug-in, he wouldn’t recommend running the extension when it’s not being used.
“Because (Proctorio) can record my keystrokes, I could be sitting here typing an email in Gmail, and it could be recording that,” Fleming said. “So what I tell my students is if you’re worried about security, install it while taking a test, and then as soon as you finish taking the exam, uninstall it. Once you uninstall it, [Proctorio] can’t do anything because it’s not installed anymore.”
Hopkins wrote that while students may believe Proctorio is an invasion of privacy, it’s in fact less invasive than if one was to take an exam in-person. Proctorio makes a video recording of the student taking the exam and runs it through an artificial intelligence system that scores the behavior and flags any moments that the AI would consider to be suspicious behavior, in turn reporting this to the professor so they can go back and make an informed decision on the flagged behavior.
“It is true, then, that the student is in some sense ‘watched’ while taking the exam, but the primary watcher is a bot, and many students will take many exams without any live human ever watching them at all,” Hopkins wrote. “This is in contrast to in-person exams or those proctored by a service like ProctorU, in which the student would be watched by a live person continuously during the whole exam.”
Students are not the only ones who are having issues with Proctorio. Some professors are opting out of using it, instead choosing either using the honor system or watching their students take exams over a Zoom call.
Junior international studies major Johnny Bethea said that after he and his classmates alike had issues last semester with Proctorio for their first exam in a historical geology class, their professor sent an email to the class stating they would no longer be using Proctorio.
“Unfortunately, Proctorio does not seem to be user friendly or have the customer service needed as all schools go online. I have tried troubleshooting with faculty and the university and the solutions we have come up with do not seem to work for all users,” the email read.
While some professors are opting out of using Proctorio, most are sticking with it. Fleming said that he thinks professors need to be flexible and accommodating for students who do happen to run into issues.
“Personally, I’m at my computer from the time students start the exam until the last student finishes, waiting to help resolve test-taking issues,” Fleming said. “If students completed the practice exam and still have problems during the test, I can help them get back up and running, and then give them an individual time extension, to make up for the lost time.”
