As schools go remote, so do tests and so do surveillance

By Monica Chin, a senior reviewer covering laptops and other gadgets. Monica was a writer for Tom’s Guide and Business Insider before joining The Verge in 2020.

The stranger on the Zoom call appeared to be sitting in a tent. He wore a black headset and a blue lanyard around his neck. Behind him was white plastic peppered with pictures of a padlock.

“Hi,” the stranger intoned. “My name is Sharath and I will be your proctor today. Please confirm your name is Jackson and that you’re about to take your 11:30 PM exam.”

“Correct,” said Jackson Hayes, from his cinder-block dorm room at the University of Arizona.

When he’d signed up for an online class in Russian cinema history, he’d had no idea it meant being surveilled over video chat by someone on the other side of the world. Hayes learned about it via an item on the class syllabus, released shortly before the semester began, that read “Examity Directions.” The syllabus instructed Hayes and his classmates to sign up for Examity, an online test-proctoring service.

To create his account, Hayes was required to upload a picture of his photo ID to Examity’s website and provide his full name, email, and phone number — pretty banal stuff. But it got weirder. At the end, he typed his name again; Examity would store a biometric template of his keystrokes.

“The website looked like it was built in 2008”

“It feels so jury-rigged together,” Hayes says. “The website looked like it was built in 2008.”

A month later, Hayes was preparing to take his first practice exam, with an Examity proctor watching him over Zoom. Hayes didn’t want to download Zoom — he’d heard about its laundry list of security concerns — but it was required to take his midterm.

Sharath told Hayes to share his screen and then to display both sides of his driver’s license in the webcam’s view. “I need to see your desk and workspace,” the proctor said. “Please rotate your webcam 360 degrees so I can see the area around you.” Hayes complied. “Please take a step back and show me the entire desk,” the proctor instructed. Again, Hayes obeyed.

Then he had to answer some security questions. Chrome thought one of the fields was for a credit card and autofilled.

“Why the fuck did that show up?” Hayes asked.

“First and last name without space,” said Sharath, unperturbed.

Hayes quickly unselected the box, but his card’s last four digits and expiration date had already been displayed.

Finally, Hayes was instructed to grant the proctor remote access to his computer. “Please open your system preferences and click on the lock icon,” the proctor said monotonically. “Please enter your computer password. Perfect. Thank you.”

At the beginning of 2019, Examity estimated that it would proctor over 2 million exams

The proctor entered a password, using Hayes’ computer, and the test — taken online through Examity’s portal — began. Sharath watched Hayes work, through his webcam, the entire time.

“I was like, holy shit, this is not good,” Hayes says.

The pandemic has increased our reliance on video chat, but remote proctoring was on the rise long before the first instance of COVID-19. The University of Arizona is one of over 500 schools that use or have used Examity in some form. It’s not the only webcam-proctoring service out there: other schools use similar live programs like ProctorU, automated services like Proctortrack, or plagiarism-detection algorithms like Turnitin. But while the novel coronavirus didn’t start the trend, it did exacerbate it. Online proctoring has seen an explosion of business as schools around the world are forced to move their classes online; the CEO of a similar service called Proctorio predicted that his service would increase its value four to five times this year.

Examity’s proctors told me they’ve been inundated with new tests since the start of the outbreak, and the company’s CEO Jim Holm confirmed that some employees have taken on additional hours. “We are grateful for our employees and their flexibility in supporting our partners during this time,” he adds.

Examity is one of the fastest-growing online-proctoring services. Employees estimate that the company had around 10 proctors in 2014, but had several hundred by the end of 2015, and it now employs over a thousand. (The Verge spoke to three Examity proctors and one former proctor for this story and granted them all anonymity to avoid retaliation from their employer.) The company doubled in size between 2018 and 2019, and it was named the fastest-growing ed-tech company in North America by Deloitte’s Fast 500. At the beginning of 2019, the company estimated that it would proctor over 2 million exams for higher education alone.

But students aren’t all on board with the widespread adoption of these services, and they haven’t been for over a decade. In 2006, a group of students at McLean High School in Virginia collected 1,190 signatures for a petition against the school’s required use of Turnitin. “It’s like if you searched every car in the parking lot or drug-tested every student,” McLean senior Ben Donovan told The Washington Post at the time.