There’s a new sheriff in town, and his name is ProctorU. Designed to monitor students during tests for online courses, this web service has us all contemplating how the development of online education has taken a strange turn. The monitoring service will be implemented this summer at Binghamton.
ProctorU requires the student to be patched in, via webcam, to a proctor who will monitor the student during a given test. According to the ProctorU website, the proctor “can see the student, see what they are doing and know who they are monitoring.” They will be able to monitor not only the student’s physical activity but his or her use of the computer as well.
Oddly enough, they seem to think that this is a positive thing for students taking online classes.
ProctorU’s video tutorial on its website explains that the service will ensure a peaceful test-taking environment, similar to one we would experience in a classroom, but is that what students who take an online course look for? Is it how professors should be structuring their online courses?
The service will all but compromise the nature of online courses, courses we take as a more leisurely, “do it yourself” alternative to the traditional classroom lecture. Online classes generally rely more on written discussion, with a bulk of the work taking the form of readings, Blackboard forums and essays.
Big Brother has apparently lost all trust in a student’s ability to take an online test without cheating, and now our personal privacy is at stake.
“The Stepford Wives” rhetoric of the ProctorU website and its videos has us all a little unnerved. Their tone makes it seem like we’re supposed to be calmed by a random stranger peering into our bedroom, watching our every physical and virtual move for hours at a time.
And if you find yourself saying, “You couldn’t pay me any amount of money to use this service,” nobody was going to pay you anyway. In fact, it’s the other way around.
That’s right, ProctorU charges each student $22.50 per test to use their services. In courses where there are two or three tests — or even more — the fees begin to add up.
Go ahead ProctorU, get students to pay more to have their every move monitored by a stranger in their own home. We dare you.
The entire operation is wrongheaded.
If online education is a direction that this school, and SUNY generally, wants to take, then ProctorU should be left out of the equation. Online education — as a supplement, not a budget-hole plug — isn’t the end of the world, but trying to simulate in-class exam environments through invasive and expensive monitoring procedures is flatly in error. In-person education is simply too different from virtual education. Seemingly easy fixes like ProctorU just complicate an already tricky situation.
If the school is worried about online test-taking dishonesty, then the curricula of online courses should be changed. Instead of paying for an unsettling new service, set new guidelines for how these tests are structured — make them less prone to cheating, more free-response based, more creatively driven.
Left to his or her own devices, a college student can generally be trusted to take a test without cheating or allowing someone else to take the test for them. Sure, cheating will always be a part of examination, but not enough to warrant a set of game-changing new requirements specifically targeting students who already automatically suffer from online-class shortcomings.
As far as moral implications go, we’ll leave that up toU, butU may want to think twice beforeU let them ProctorU.