23 ms·

Parents demand academic publisher drop Proctorio surveillance tech

258 points by elsewhen 6y ago

estaseuropano 6y ago
The world of school software and educational materials is a dystopian and dysfunctional nightmare. Nearly all a re badly designed, sloe, confusing and built with accidental and intentional backdoors, spyware and software sxpliciftly intended to cripple your PC (no screenshots, no copying, phone home functions)... And all of them are deeply designed for 'lock in' - nothing more profitable than a guaranteed multi year contract with tens of thousands of unwilling students. 98% of features are broken and just exist on fancy marketing documents to make sure some lying middleman can push them through a procurement process. I remember being at an EdTech conference ~ 7 years ago and even then i was not just stunned by the amount of false claims (AI, ...) but also generally where the focus lay (anti-fraud, student control, web filters...). The whole ecosystem is just massively broken with students and teachers at most as an afterthought. Neither the entrenched companies nor startups seem to understand concepts like PEDAGOGY, TRUST or student-teacher RELATIONSHIP and instead consider students somewhere akin to criminals to be monitored, controlled and indoctrinated and teachers as nothing more than passive vessels that need ready made solutions and no freedom whatsoever. In the end your average functional school probably gets some of this software but most likely would fate best with its own install of Moodle (for all its flaws - reliable, lots of community support, and cheap) and then various web apps. With the current ecosystem most students and teachers fare best with just nothing than with any of this. School districts/owners should invest into teacher training and maybe generic moodle instances, and to get laptops near the classrooms. But please don't buy any of this evil crap.
- coldcode 6y ago
  Most school software of this type are designed to profit the companies and lose the students forever.
- senko 6y ago
  EdTech is "enterprise software" in the sense that the people controlling the purse strings are very removed from the actual users. In education, the decision makers are the school district leadership team, while the actual users are twice removed - students. This scenario encourages focus on features that are important for the decision makers and less focus on the features (or usability) important for the actual users - exactly as you describe. A bottom-up approach where students and teachers would identify what works best for them and push for it is extremely hard. Teachers try the best but are limited by their budgets (many pay out of their own purse for tools and equipment!) and students have basically no say. This leads to the situation where most successful (profitable, largest) edtech software has no relation to what actually might be the best tool.
  - gorgoiler 6y ago
    Even in the private sector (my school is independent, with 600 pupils, 200 staff, $20M revenue) things are as bad. Technical decision making is by an IT department that reports through the bursar (head of all non academic staff) to the head. There’s no accountability to core competency: teaching and learning. We are merely stakeholders at an equal level on the org chart. Contrast this to when I was a FAANG SWE, when every function at the company — including IT — was subordinate to those who built the actual tech: Engineering. The flip side is that as a teacher I have complete autonomy over anything that does fall to me; namely the bulk of the CS curriculum and the way it is taught. (Tools like repl.it are wonderful for completely side stepping any involvement with bureaucracy. Invite the kids to sign up and just get stuff done.)
- chongli 6y ago
  The entire situation you described is perfectly relatable if you’ve read The Case Against Education by Bryan Caplan [1]. In it, Caplan argues that the true purpose of education is not to improve students but for students to signal their worth as employees to their future employers. He backs up this argument with a bibliography of studies many pages long. I read the book as part of a philosophy course I took in university and as a decidedly non-libertarian person (Caplan is a libertarian economist), I found it a very challenging argument to confront. What was so vexing was how much his points seemed to agree with my experiences. My peers and fellow classmates were doing exactly as he described in the book: taking “bird courses” instead of challenging ones, only taking the minimum requirements for their degree and avoiding the optional challenging electives, memorizing / begging / borrowing / stealing / cheating their way to the best grades possible in their classes at the expense of actual learning. In the COVID era of online classes, class averages have gone way up. The academic integrity offices of most faculties have been overwhelmed with cheating cases. If the true purpose of education is to better oneself, why are so many people taking the opportunity to cheat at a time when schools have less ability to monitor for it? This is a question that vexes me endlessly, as a student trying to get the most out of his education. I have been taking as many challenging courses as I can, and plan to continue doing so for the remainder of my degree. I don’t cheat and consequently I find myself well below the high class averages. It leaves me wondering: am I the naïve one? [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Case_Against_Education https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Case_Against_Education
  - _jal 6y ago
    The US is a culture that has been repeating things like 'winning isn't everything, it is the only thing' from TVs, books, role models and T-shirts since before you could read. We have a president (for a bit longer) that celebrates not paying taxes. Many forms of white-collar crime are profitable after penalties. Culturally, you're being told you're a sucker if you don't cheat. Is it any surprise that an unmotivated person, (or a motivated one feeling pressure) will then turn around and cheat?
    - chongli 6y ago
      The US is a culture that has been repeating things like 'winning isn't everything, it is the only thing' A large proportion of the students we've caught cheating in our course (I'm a full-time assistant for a first-year CS course) are international students. This is a global phenomenon, not a US-specific one.
- the_snooze 6y ago
  Edtech is one of those cases where the product is designed for the decision-makers, not for the people who actually end up using it. https://twitter.com/random_walker/status/1182635589604171776 https://twitter.com/random_walker/status/1182635589604171776
  - anamexis 6y ago
    I think that's true for the big players, like the Learning Management Systems (like Blackboard in your linked tweet.) For everyone else, their problem is that they have to integrate with the big players.
- Robin_Message 6y ago
  If anyone is involved in choosing software for schools, I used to work at Firefly Learning which had an excellent attitude towards actually serving our users (students, teachers, parents, generally in that order) rather than the decision makers. It showed. For example, an independent satisfaction survey in the UK gave them twice the user approval of the next best platform. (No current affiliation but they are a nice bunch and do a great job.)
- Solocomplex 6y ago
  It seems general-purpose computers are unfit for the task.
- 908B64B197 6y ago
  It's one of the reasons I'm really happy with Windows S and ARM machines getting on the market. Want to install your special snowflake driver to take screenshots and do some tampering monitoring? Not allowed! You just detected a VM? Of course you did, every app runs in a sandbox now!
spacephysics 6y ago
I hope the good that comes from this (and the pandemic) is that people are more aware, and perhaps care more, about their digital privacy, and companies relentless attack against it.
- boringg 6y ago
  I would hopes so but definitely wouldn’t bank on that.
- frankfrankfrank 6y ago
  I find it quite interesting you say that in the present time where we are staring down the barrel of global tyranny and most people don’t even have a clue what they’re looking at, let alone that this isn’t all actually fine the way things are as this virus is used to totally upend things through psychological warfare on the whole world, but mostly on the west. For example, we have long had what us communism in the form of subsidies, but now governments are literally running mentally planned economies with trillion dollar “bailout” after “bailout” that is literally deciding on where resources are allocated and which companies survive. What’s even worse, it’s even international communism as hundreds of millions of Americana’s wealth is being given to foreign countries like Sudan, Israel, etc. why exactly does Israel, a very advanced country, get $500 million of Americans’ wealth on top of what has already been given them just in the last year?
  - tw25506007 6y ago
    The phenomenon you describe isn't "communism", nor is it recent. Private interests have long tried to use the unique power of the state to shield themselves from market forces. Unfortunately, the people have not only abetted that, but often demanded it; see the recent demands to enshrine extant ISPs as government-chartered monopolies (i.e., utilities) rather than remove the anti-competitive regulations that have fomented high costs and poor service. As for bailouts, there too the people have long been convinced that the government needs to "fix" the market. Unsurprisingly, the means by which these "fixes" occur happens to benefit the ruling class (politicians and corporate executives) and big firms, giving them a competitive advantage over would-be competitors, and thereby growing ever bigger.
wil421 6y ago
McGraw-Hill was pushing PDFs when I was starting to get into my major classes. One class's PDF was so bad our teacher got into direct contact with the McGraw-Hill rep. The PDF cost more than the physical book and the text was completely unreadable. They ended up giving us some kind of Xerox copy of the book because they were unable to supply a pdf you could read. The resolution of the text was absolutely terrible. I am glad I graduated before they started monitoring us. Most of my major classes were open book but there's no way you had enough time to look everything up or understand the complex subject. McGraw-Hill is looking for any way to squeeze more money out of the school and students.
- tinus_hn 6y ago
  Then again, if they had provided a normal pdf do you think the teacher would have voluntarily paid for its use?
  - Craighead 6y ago
    Why should this knowledge be part of a system meant to squeeze efficiency from?
uS436aRs6BbC30c 6y ago
The article seems to make it all about race, but I really don’t see how race has anything to do with all the ways American education is broken. This is a case of perverse incentives. American K-12 schools are set up first and foremost as holding tanks for kids while parents work. This by itself sets a low standard for education, but a high bar for control of students. This control requirement simply gets translated to software, so there’s no surprise that we get dystopian spyware disguised as educational packages. My very white child, who is stuck doing remote learning, is held under the same thumb as the 45% of kids in her class who are black. The major difference between my kid and others is that I turn off her internet access at random intervals in order to create some unstructured time for her. School teaches nothing of value anyway - why waste time on it?
c17r 6y ago
Proctorio’s behavior is certainly appalling. There should be restrictions on how much DMCA abuse is tolerated before sticking them into “timeout”. And if a legitimate need arises while in timeout, too bad so sad. The court case is particularly disgusting. He should win and get treble his court fees, though dunno if Canada has that. But having said that, I feel for schools as they have to do SOMETHING and there is just nothing good. Can’t have just the honor system cuz that’s worked so well. But if these systems are over the top (and they are) what do you do? I’m glad I’m not having to take tests using this kind of software. I tend to look around at other things when deep thinking. Even if no music on, I use N/C headphones to keep sounds out. Hell, if it’s particular hard problem I might start sub vocalizing as I work it through. All habits that would get me dinged left and right.
- csharptwdec19 6y ago
  > There should be restrictions on how much DMCA abuse is tolerated before sticking them into “timeout”. And if a legitimate need arises while in timeout, too bad so sad. Absolutely. The legal world even has a term for this already, "Vexatious Litigant" [0]. We need to start applying this to DMCA requests. [0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vexatious_litigation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vexatious_litigation
  - HowTheStoryEnds 6y ago
    It's perjury at 1 so strictly speaking there are restrictions. Problem is that it's too hard/costly to act upon them.
- kaitai 6y ago
  Change teaching so that they don't need proctoring. I say that as a teacher. But that's a ton of work, hard to do uniformly, depends a lot on the teacher's training and the number of students, depends a lot on institutional support for teachers....
  - c17r 6y ago
    "Change teaching so that they don't need proctoring" sounds a bit like a "draw the rest of the owl".
gnusty_gnurc 6y ago
> The parents end the letter with an unequivocal demand for McGraw-Hill to "cease its performative allyship and end its peddling of racially-biased, invasive surveillance technology immediately." Most allyship is performative. Social justice circles are rife with rituals that incentivize faking it. Then compound that with an atmosphere where you're practically forced into repeating whatever dogma they throw at you at some corporate HR diversity meeting. They lead with the DiAngelo/Kendi line "you're racist and any defense is evidence you're racist". And people are suprised about "performativeness"? Nevermind the white liberals with the same affect of fundamentalist Christians going to penance. It's all fake. The vocabulary of “allies” is insufferable too. What is this the Yalta Conference?
indymike 6y ago
At the beginning of the school year, I noticed some strange HTTP traffic going through my home router to China and India endpoints. So, I traced the traffic to the Chromebooks my kids in public school were using. About that time, my son was unable to access his drum lessons (Steven's Drum Shed, highly recommend) because safety software provided by the school was blocking him. After analyzing the chromebook more, I discovered the traffic going to China was requesting ads and then requesting the hyperlink for the ad (ok, so ad fraud it is). I also noticed that the safety software was logging all HTTP requests to their server. So, I went to the school district and requested they remove it. They initially said, "if we remove it, your kids won't be able to access their academic work." So, I sent a letter to the Superintendent that politely asked they remove the safety software from my family's chromebook as it violated my children's and my family's rights (unreasonable search, get a warrant). I also told them I would hold them responsible for the cost of having the software removed by an expert (which my lawyer suggested would be the thing that got their attention and we'd be able to win in small claims court). The next day, they removed the "safety" software.
- dekhn 6y ago
  As a reminder, if you want to achieve anything with chools, this is how you do it. A polite letter, nonthreatening, filled with facts, and a cost to the school if they continue.
  - lotsofpulp 6y ago
    The threat of costs from the small claims court system is the only reason they achieved anything.
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
    - reaperducer 6y ago
      Probably not. School districts have lawyers on staff. It's not you or me who would have a new expense of $x/hour for a lawyer.
mac01021 6y ago
Not a great headline in terms of parseability.
wmf 6y ago
Let's replace Proctorio with Factorio and see what happens.
- a1369209993 6y ago
  The kids learn more than ten times as much (not that that's a high bar), but can't 'prove' it on useless^Wstandardized tests, so the bean counters ax it.
tantalor 6y ago
What does proctoring surveillance have to do with performative allyship?
- kyrieeschaton 6y ago
  Because in the education sector, the dominant ideology is some vague form of antiracism, and rhetorical appeals to the interests of blacks etc are the only way (or at least a prerequisite) to get anything done.
splix 6y ago
I've got a recent experience with similar software (and still having PTSD from it), and I don't even think it really provides any real protection against cheaters. Ok, maybe all those AI-things to track head and eyes movements even work, though I find it a stupid idea. More interesting is their exam protection part. It records the screen, limits the software you can run, disables copy-paste, disables external monitor and keyboard on a laptop, etc. All to avoid leaking of the exam questions. And it's super annoying for the student. But I don't think they protect from custom browser scripts like with Greasemonkey, and there is just no way to detect a proxy server that makes copies of the requested pages with the exam content. So it's only a Security Theater, nothing more.
TedShiller 6y ago
Surveillance does not have a race bias
baybal2 6y ago
Write the guy a letter: https://www.linkedin.com/in/artfulhacker/ https://www.linkedin.com/in/artfulhacker/
jcun4128 6y ago
side note: I'm surprised it's able to get off the pad if it's really sits flush, would think you'd need some clearance/gap
legerdemain 6y ago
A wise man once said, "Cheating is another way of being prepared. Basically, memorizing something is cheating. You knew the answer before the test was given. And so, by taking the test and saying you learned that stuff, that's cheating."
- jpambrun 6y ago
  "Stealing is just another way of earning". This is some seriously odd mental gymnastics.
  - MeinBlutIstBlau 6y ago
    That said it's pretty absurd you can't use a search engine to find an answer nowadays. Is being able to ace a test really going to prove you "learned" something? No it's not. It's just the system devised for accredited institutions to say "it sure is!" This is why technical colleges focus on internships, apprenticeships, and employer advised programs so that you get skills employers want upon graduating. Not worthless head knowledge.

258 points by elsewhen 6y ago

The world of school software and educational materials is a dystopian and dysfunctional nightmare. Nearly all a re badly designed, sloe, confusing and built with accidental and intentional backdoors, spyware and software sxpliciftly intended to cripple your PC (no screenshots, no copying, phone home functions)... And all of them are deeply designed for 'lock in' - nothing more profitable than a guaranteed multi year contract with tens of thousands of unwilling students. 98% of features are broken and just exist on fancy marketing documents to make sure some lying middleman can push them through a procurement process. I remember being at an EdTech conference ~ 7 years ago and even then i was not just stunned by the amount of false claims (AI, ...) but also generally where the focus lay (anti-fraud, student control, web filters...). The whole ecosystem is just massively broken with students and teachers at most as an afterthought. Neither the entrenched companies nor startups seem to understand concepts like PEDAGOGY, TRUST or student-teacher RELATIONSHIP and instead consider students somewhere akin to criminals to be monitored, controlled and indoctrinated and teachers as nothing more than passive vessels that need ready made solutions and no freedom whatsoever. In the end your average functional school probably gets some of this software but most likely would fate best with its own install of Moodle (for all its flaws - reliable, lots of community support, and cheap) and then various web apps. With the current ecosystem most students and teachers fare best with just nothing than with any of this. School districts/owners should invest into teacher training and maybe generic moodle instances, and to get laptops near the classrooms. But please don't buy any of this evil crap.

coldcode 6y ago
Most school software of this type are designed to profit the companies and lose the students forever.
senko 6y ago
EdTech is "enterprise software" in the sense that the people controlling the purse strings are very removed from the actual users. In education, the decision makers are the school district leadership team, while the actual users are twice removed - students. This scenario encourages focus on features that are important for the decision makers and less focus on the features (or usability) important for the actual users - exactly as you describe. A bottom-up approach where students and teachers would identify what works best for them and push for it is extremely hard. Teachers try the best but are limited by their budgets (many pay out of their own purse for tools and equipment!) and students have basically no say. This leads to the situation where most successful (profitable, largest) edtech software has no relation to what actually might be the best tool.
- gorgoiler 6y ago
  Even in the private sector (my school is independent, with 600 pupils, 200 staff, $20M revenue) things are as bad. Technical decision making is by an IT department that reports through the bursar (head of all non academic staff) to the head. There’s no accountability to core competency: teaching and learning. We are merely stakeholders at an equal level on the org chart. Contrast this to when I was a FAANG SWE, when every function at the company — including IT — was subordinate to those who built the actual tech: Engineering. The flip side is that as a teacher I have complete autonomy over anything that does fall to me; namely the bulk of the CS curriculum and the way it is taught. (Tools like repl.it are wonderful for completely side stepping any involvement with bureaucracy. Invite the kids to sign up and just get stuff done.)
chongli 6y ago
The entire situation you described is perfectly relatable if you’ve read The Case Against Education by Bryan Caplan [1]. In it, Caplan argues that the true purpose of education is not to improve students but for students to signal their worth as employees to their future employers. He backs up this argument with a bibliography of studies many pages long. I read the book as part of a philosophy course I took in university and as a decidedly non-libertarian person (Caplan is a libertarian economist), I found it a very challenging argument to confront. What was so vexing was how much his points seemed to agree with my experiences. My peers and fellow classmates were doing exactly as he described in the book: taking “bird courses” instead of challenging ones, only taking the minimum requirements for their degree and avoiding the optional challenging electives, memorizing / begging / borrowing / stealing / cheating their way to the best grades possible in their classes at the expense of actual learning. In the COVID era of online classes, class averages have gone way up. The academic integrity offices of most faculties have been overwhelmed with cheating cases. If the true purpose of education is to better oneself, why are so many people taking the opportunity to cheat at a time when schools have less ability to monitor for it? This is a question that vexes me endlessly, as a student trying to get the most out of his education. I have been taking as many challenging courses as I can, and plan to continue doing so for the remainder of my degree. I don’t cheat and consequently I find myself well below the high class averages. It leaves me wondering: am I the naïve one? [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Case_Against_Education https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Case_Against_Education
- _jal 6y ago
  The US is a culture that has been repeating things like 'winning isn't everything, it is the only thing' from TVs, books, role models and T-shirts since before you could read. We have a president (for a bit longer) that celebrates not paying taxes. Many forms of white-collar crime are profitable after penalties. Culturally, you're being told you're a sucker if you don't cheat. Is it any surprise that an unmotivated person, (or a motivated one feeling pressure) will then turn around and cheat?
  - chongli 6y ago
    The US is a culture that has been repeating things like 'winning isn't everything, it is the only thing' A large proportion of the students we've caught cheating in our course (I'm a full-time assistant for a first-year CS course) are international students. This is a global phenomenon, not a US-specific one.
the_snooze 6y ago
Edtech is one of those cases where the product is designed for the decision-makers, not for the people who actually end up using it. https://twitter.com/random_walker/status/1182635589604171776 https://twitter.com/random_walker/status/1182635589604171776
- anamexis 6y ago
  I think that's true for the big players, like the Learning Management Systems (like Blackboard in your linked tweet.) For everyone else, their problem is that they have to integrate with the big players.
Robin_Message 6y ago
If anyone is involved in choosing software for schools, I used to work at Firefly Learning which had an excellent attitude towards actually serving our users (students, teachers, parents, generally in that order) rather than the decision makers. It showed. For example, an independent satisfaction survey in the UK gave them twice the user approval of the next best platform. (No current affiliation but they are a nice bunch and do a great job.)
Solocomplex 6y ago
It seems general-purpose computers are unfit for the task.
908B64B197 6y ago
It's one of the reasons I'm really happy with Windows S and ARM machines getting on the market. Want to install your special snowflake driver to take screenshots and do some tampering monitoring? Not allowed! You just detected a VM? Of course you did, every app runs in a sandbox now!

spacephysics 6y ago

I hope the good that comes from this (and the pandemic) is that people are more aware, and perhaps care more, about their digital privacy, and companies relentless attack against it.

boringg 6y ago
I would hopes so but definitely wouldn’t bank on that.
frankfrankfrank 6y ago
I find it quite interesting you say that in the present time where we are staring down the barrel of global tyranny and most people don’t even have a clue what they’re looking at, let alone that this isn’t all actually fine the way things are as this virus is used to totally upend things through psychological warfare on the whole world, but mostly on the west. For example, we have long had what us communism in the form of subsidies, but now governments are literally running mentally planned economies with trillion dollar “bailout” after “bailout” that is literally deciding on where resources are allocated and which companies survive. What’s even worse, it’s even international communism as hundreds of millions of Americana’s wealth is being given to foreign countries like Sudan, Israel, etc. why exactly does Israel, a very advanced country, get $500 million of Americans’ wealth on top of what has already been given them just in the last year?
- tw25506007 6y ago
  The phenomenon you describe isn't "communism", nor is it recent. Private interests have long tried to use the unique power of the state to shield themselves from market forces. Unfortunately, the people have not only abetted that, but often demanded it; see the recent demands to enshrine extant ISPs as government-chartered monopolies (i.e., utilities) rather than remove the anti-competitive regulations that have fomented high costs and poor service. As for bailouts, there too the people have long been convinced that the government needs to "fix" the market. Unsurprisingly, the means by which these "fixes" occur happens to benefit the ruling class (politicians and corporate executives) and big firms, giving them a competitive advantage over would-be competitors, and thereby growing ever bigger.

wil421 6y ago

McGraw-Hill was pushing PDFs when I was starting to get into my major classes. One class's PDF was so bad our teacher got into direct contact with the McGraw-Hill rep. The PDF cost more than the physical book and the text was completely unreadable. They ended up giving us some kind of Xerox copy of the book because they were unable to supply a pdf you could read. The resolution of the text was absolutely terrible. I am glad I graduated before they started monitoring us. Most of my major classes were open book but there's no way you had enough time to look everything up or understand the complex subject. McGraw-Hill is looking for any way to squeeze more money out of the school and students.

tinus_hn 6y ago
Then again, if they had provided a normal pdf do you think the teacher would have voluntarily paid for its use?
- Craighead 6y ago
  Why should this knowledge be part of a system meant to squeeze efficiency from?

uS436aRs6BbC30c 6y ago

The article seems to make it all about race, but I really don’t see how race has anything to do with all the ways American education is broken. This is a case of perverse incentives. American K-12 schools are set up first and foremost as holding tanks for kids while parents work. This by itself sets a low standard for education, but a high bar for control of students. This control requirement simply gets translated to software, so there’s no surprise that we get dystopian spyware disguised as educational packages. My very white child, who is stuck doing remote learning, is held under the same thumb as the 45% of kids in her class who are black. The major difference between my kid and others is that I turn off her internet access at random intervals in order to create some unstructured time for her. School teaches nothing of value anyway - why waste time on it?

c17r 6y ago

Proctorio’s behavior is certainly appalling. There should be restrictions on how much DMCA abuse is tolerated before sticking them into “timeout”. And if a legitimate need arises while in timeout, too bad so sad. The court case is particularly disgusting. He should win and get treble his court fees, though dunno if Canada has that. But having said that, I feel for schools as they have to do SOMETHING and there is just nothing good. Can’t have just the honor system cuz that’s worked so well. But if these systems are over the top (and they are) what do you do? I’m glad I’m not having to take tests using this kind of software. I tend to look around at other things when deep thinking. Even if no music on, I use N/C headphones to keep sounds out. Hell, if it’s particular hard problem I might start sub vocalizing as I work it through. All habits that would get me dinged left and right.

csharptwdec19 6y ago
> There should be restrictions on how much DMCA abuse is tolerated before sticking them into “timeout”. And if a legitimate need arises while in timeout, too bad so sad. Absolutely. The legal world even has a term for this already, "Vexatious Litigant" [0]. We need to start applying this to DMCA requests. [0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vexatious_litigation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vexatious_litigation
- HowTheStoryEnds 6y ago
  It's perjury at 1 so strictly speaking there are restrictions. Problem is that it's too hard/costly to act upon them.
kaitai 6y ago
Change teaching so that they don't need proctoring. I say that as a teacher. But that's a ton of work, hard to do uniformly, depends a lot on the teacher's training and the number of students, depends a lot on institutional support for teachers....
- c17r 6y ago
  "Change teaching so that they don't need proctoring" sounds a bit like a "draw the rest of the owl".

gnusty_gnurc 6y ago

> The parents end the letter with an unequivocal demand for McGraw-Hill to "cease its performative allyship and end its peddling of racially-biased, invasive surveillance technology immediately." Most allyship is performative. Social justice circles are rife with rituals that incentivize faking it. Then compound that with an atmosphere where you're practically forced into repeating whatever dogma they throw at you at some corporate HR diversity meeting. They lead with the DiAngelo/Kendi line "you're racist and any defense is evidence you're racist". And people are suprised about "performativeness"? Nevermind the white liberals with the same affect of fundamentalist Christians going to penance. It's all fake. The vocabulary of “allies” is insufferable too. What is this the Yalta Conference?

indymike 6y ago

At the beginning of the school year, I noticed some strange HTTP traffic going through my home router to China and India endpoints. So, I traced the traffic to the Chromebooks my kids in public school were using. About that time, my son was unable to access his drum lessons (Steven's Drum Shed, highly recommend) because safety software provided by the school was blocking him. After analyzing the chromebook more, I discovered the traffic going to China was requesting ads and then requesting the hyperlink for the ad (ok, so ad fraud it is). I also noticed that the safety software was logging all HTTP requests to their server. So, I went to the school district and requested they remove it. They initially said, "if we remove it, your kids won't be able to access their academic work." So, I sent a letter to the Superintendent that politely asked they remove the safety software from my family's chromebook as it violated my children's and my family's rights (unreasonable search, get a warrant). I also told them I would hold them responsible for the cost of having the software removed by an expert (which my lawyer suggested would be the thing that got their attention and we'd be able to win in small claims court). The next day, they removed the "safety" software.

dekhn 6y ago
As a reminder, if you want to achieve anything with chools, this is how you do it. A polite letter, nonthreatening, filled with facts, and a cost to the school if they continue.
- lotsofpulp 6y ago
  The threat of costs from the small claims court system is the only reason they achieved anything.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - reaperducer 6y ago
    Probably not. School districts have lawyers on staff. It's not you or me who would have a new expense of $x/hour for a lawyer.

mac01021 6y ago

Not a great headline in terms of parseability.

wmf 6y ago

Let's replace Proctorio with Factorio and see what happens.

a1369209993 6y ago
The kids learn more than ten times as much (not that that's a high bar), but can't 'prove' it on useless^Wstandardized tests, so the bean counters ax it.

tantalor 6y ago

What does proctoring surveillance have to do with performative allyship?

kyrieeschaton 6y ago
Because in the education sector, the dominant ideology is some vague form of antiracism, and rhetorical appeals to the interests of blacks etc are the only way (or at least a prerequisite) to get anything done.

splix 6y ago

I've got a recent experience with similar software (and still having PTSD from it), and I don't even think it really provides any real protection against cheaters. Ok, maybe all those AI-things to track head and eyes movements even work, though I find it a stupid idea. More interesting is their exam protection part. It records the screen, limits the software you can run, disables copy-paste, disables external monitor and keyboard on a laptop, etc. All to avoid leaking of the exam questions. And it's super annoying for the student. But I don't think they protect from custom browser scripts like with Greasemonkey, and there is just no way to detect a proxy server that makes copies of the requested pages with the exam content. So it's only a Security Theater, nothing more.

TedShiller 6y ago

Surveillance does not have a race bias

baybal2 6y ago

Write the guy a letter: https://www.linkedin.com/in/artfulhacker/ https://www.linkedin.com/in/artfulhacker/

jcun4128 6y ago

side note: I'm surprised it's able to get off the pad if it's really sits flush, would think you'd need some clearance/gap

legerdemain 6y ago

A wise man once said, "Cheating is another way of being prepared. Basically, memorizing something is cheating. You knew the answer before the test was given. And so, by taking the test and saying you learned that stuff, that's cheating."

jpambrun 6y ago
"Stealing is just another way of earning". This is some seriously odd mental gymnastics.
- MeinBlutIstBlau 6y ago
  That said it's pretty absurd you can't use a search engine to find an answer nowadays. Is being able to ace a test really going to prove you "learned" something? No it's not. It's just the system devised for accredited institutions to say "it sure is!" This is why technical colleges focus on internships, apprenticeships, and employer advised programs so that you get skills employers want upon graduating. Not worthless head knowledge.