In a preliminary victory in the continuing fight against privacy-invasive software that “watches” students taking tests remotely, a French administrative court outside Paris suspended a university’s use of the e-proctoring platform TestWe, which monitors students through facial recognition and algorithmic analysis.
TestWe software, much like Proctorio, Examsoft, and other proctoring apps we’ve called out for intrusive monitoring of exam takers, constantly tracks students’ eye movements and their surroundings using video and sound analysis. The court in Montreuil, France, ruled that such “permanent surveillance of bodies and sounds” is unreasonable and excessive for the purpose preventing cheating.
Proctoring apps came roaring on the scene during the COVID-19 pandemic when closed schools switched to remote learning. Proctoring software makers promised schools a way to continue to administer and control high-stakes tests to students at home—by surveilling them, tracking their keystrokes, checking if their eyes moved away from the screen, and watching to see if they navigated away from the test, all through their computers.
There’s a lot wrong with these apps. They invade students’ privacy, exacerbate existing inequities in educational outcomes, and can never fully match the control schools are used to enforcing in the test hall. And they are faulty: ProctorU, one of the largest remote proctoring companies, recently stopped selling fully-automated proctoring services because too few administrators and teachers were reviewing the results to determine whether or not a flagged violation was actually a violation. Although many students have gone back to in-person learning, remote proctoring is still in use, and we don’t believe it is going away anytime soon.
The TestWe case is one of the first we’ve seen in Europ
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