What happens after you’re flagged by virtual proctoring software? The information goes to the institution that is testing you, leaving your teachers to decide if you’re guilty or not. Shea Swauger, a librarian and PhD student who has written about dismantling racism and inequity in education, says that we need to have more “serious conversations as why the f*** we’re teaching this way.” Swauger is concerned that the software is an “incredible violation of privacy” and could promote ableism, classism, racism, and transphobia. “I couldn’t design a more discriminatory system if I tried,” Swauger said.

In May 2021, YR spoke with two students of color who said they were delayed in taking a mock LSAT exam when ExamSoft technology initially failed to detect them — the exact thing Swauger fears: “Proctoring is part of a larger arc of higher education tracking things as a way of showing effectiveness and proficiency.” And even if the software does provide more data, do teachers even have enough time to sift through it?

For Swauger, part of the solution lies in increasing government oversight, and lucky for him, it’s already happening. In December 2020, six senators wrote virtual proctoring companies asking them to respond to news reports documenting instances of discriminatory bias and perceived privacy violations.

As a teaching assistant at Louisiana State University (LSU) in Baton Rouge, Jaylyn Stubbs also had concerns about virtual proctoring services — although hers had less to do with privacy and more to do with social class. As YR Media reported last May, LSU was one school where students had to pay for their own exams. “... fifteen dollars, is like, it might not seem like a lot of money, but that's money that nobody wants to give to a math test.”

Stubbs said that she wasn’t that concerned about privacy because proctoring was already a big part of her education, and she wanted to make sure everyone was taking the tests without cheating. “I understand the system itself, but for the students that can't really afford it, I don't feel like it's fair that they have to come out of pocket to take a test that was already in place before they even got in the class,” Stubbs said. “Some students aren't able to, you know, eat three times a day. So it’s like you're making them take three or four tests a semester. It may sound small, but that's money that they can put towards something else or that's money that they don't even have.”

Dr. Jackson Wilson, the vice chair of the Academic Senate at San Francisco State University, says that teachers should be suspicious of the software, not the students. He outlined concerns that virtual proctoring technology “casts faculty in the role of police catching cheaters, rather [than] faculty acting as mentors to facilitate student success.”

One method teachers and students are using to organize against use of the technology is passing resolutions with their Academic Senates and student governments. That’s exactly what Dr. Wilson did at San Francisco State University, which now has a resolution that encourages educators not to use virtual proctoring. As virtual proctoring continues to grow in remote learning settings, how will it affect the trust needed to build strong communities essential for learning?

Concerns about trust are also being echoed by students, who fear the technology might negatively affect their relationships with teachers. “I would argue that using these [tools] kind of built a lot of suspicion between professors, students,” said Talha Ahmad, an undergraduate at Purdue who authored a student government resolution against the technology. “And when so many people fall into problems like being falsely flagged for cheating or things like that, it makes me wonder, is this really achieving the objective of education?”