When proctoring an online academic event, organizations must balance three important requirements:
Satisfying all three requirements is no easy task. Below, learn how Integrity Advocate combines cutting-edge technology with human reviewers to achieve the delicate balance needed to meet all three.
When considering an online proctoring service, organizations want to ensure that they maintain a level of academic integrity similar to or better than what can be achieved by an in-person invigilator. In-person invigilators have an inherent ability to analyze a situation and make appropriate judgements. For example, students in an exam hall are usually asked to put all electronics into silent mode and place them underneath their chairs. However, occasionally students forget, and a phone rings. An in-person invigilator could easily view the student quickly turning off the phone and allow the exam to proceed without disqualifying them.
If that same situation were to occur in an online proctored environment where decisions are made by a strict and unwavering enforcement of rules, the student would fail the exam or be disqualified for using their phone once the exam had started. This inflexibility leads to student body frustrations and increased time spent by faculty and administration correcting the issue.
Discretion is clearly necessary. But the question remains: how much and under what conditions should it be applied? The potential scenarios are unlimited, but an experienced invigilator knows that in every situation, they must ask themselves: Could this behaviour provide the student with an unfair advantage that would lessen the academic integrity of the event? Similarly, an online proctoring service must be able to do the same.
Consider a situation where online proctoring has identified two users involved in an event for which “sole participation” is a requirement...
Scroll to the bottom of the page for additional sample events with flagged frames and reviewer notes.
At first glance, it seems clear the rule “sole participation” has been violated. But Integrity Advocate acts similar to an in-person invigilator by providing discretion and considering five additional factors:
Online proctored events should use the same discretionary review techniques as in-person invigilators to ensure that academic integrity is balanced with common sense. Integrity Advocate’s reviewers flag sessions based on context, timing, duration, repetition, and perceived benefit.
Ensuring student privacy is a critical consideration of any online proctoring solution. Much of the proctoring technology in the market today requires students to install extensions or plug-ins with real malware risks or program installs with no limitations on the data they can collect. Privacy regulations are often ignored or selectively interpreted, resulting in students being forced to submit if they want to pursue their education.
A key component of legislated privacy protection is to not collect, store, or share more information than is necessary for the communicated purpose. The “communicated purpose” that students are expected to accept is “limited online monitoring conducted for the purpose of identifying any individuals not complying with the established academic standard”.
An organization’s desire for academic integrity is not absolute and needs to make considerations for the protection of student privacy. Take screen recording, for example. Proctoring services that consistently record the student’s screen can see personal email, texts, programs, shortcuts, browsing activity, and more. There is no need to capture that much sensitive personal information, when the requirement for integrity may be only that the student does not leave the designated exam screen.
This same principle of only collecting what is necessary can be seen in how organizations use PayPal; they need to ensure that the payment details (i.e., credit card number) are valid without the need to see the actual credit card details. Consumers have developed a significant level of trust in PayPal knowing that the sharing of their financial information is highly restricted and only under situations of non-payment or fraud would all relevant financial details be shared.
Integrity Advocate mirrors the PayPal model by limiting the information shared across LMS’s and networks to only the image of fully compliant students. In situations where potential non-compliance is identified additional frames are “flagged” and shared to provide support for the violations.
Additionally, Integrity Advocate reviews all flagged frames for personal information that is not pertinent to the potential violation and obscures it from the institution. Examples of personal information include religious, political, or socially controversial imagery and potentially embarrassing acts or paraphernalia.
The only information shared from Integrity Advocate externally is what is required to support the flagged rule violation. All other information is deleted in 24 hours, long enough for a potential quality control review.
Learners should never be forced to share unnecessary personal information to complete an online proctored event. Integrity Advocate respects their right to privacy through process and policy, following the protocols of other information sensitive services such as PayPal.
The third aspect of this delicate balance is accessibility, or the need for technologies not to create unnecessary barriers for individuals with disabilities. The attention to application accessibility is crucial, as one billion people worldwide are living with a disability. As a socially conscious organization, we believe that we have a duty to accommodate when it is reasonable to do so.
Here are two examples of online proctoring technology that limits differently-abled learners:
Online proctoring technology must be accessible for all users. Integrity Advocate provides the flexibility that institutions need to make their online proctoring accessible to all their students.
If any of the three critical components of a successful online proctoring technology are ignored or given greater weight than the others, disruption will soon follow.
Integrity Advocate knows through experience that the best outcomes come from a proctoring technology and service that has been designed for integrity, privacy, and accessibility.
Below, you will find short sample videos of live learning events accompanied by Integrity Advocate flags, in addition to considerations that our reviewers make when proctoring events.
A note on our review process: Some tentative flags are automatically applied by integrated technological capabilities during the live session, but all sessions are then reviewed by an Integrity Advocate representative after the event is complete. The representative reviews the session at a 3-5 times speed, stopping, rewinding, and reviewing at standard speeds any situation that could be a rules violation. All tentative flags are reviewed for accuracy and confirmed or cleared. All reviews are subject to review by another and more senior representative.
When a student is observed using a device, we must determine if it was for the purpose of compliance (did they turn the phone to silent and place it out of view?) or a violation (do they appear to be using it for communication purposes or to answer questions?)
If a student leaves camera view, was it simply to pick up a dropped pencil or change their position, or did they deliberately obscure the camera?
Are the student's eye movements natural, normal behaviour (looking into the distance when thinking), or are they frequently looking in one direction at possible reference materials?
Is the student wearing headphones to block external sound, or are the headphones connected to a device?
The only identity verification, participation monitoring, and exam proctoring solution built on Privacy by Design principles, Integrity Advocate protects learner privacy and ensures assessment integrity for online learning events. Leveraging human review aided by artificial intelligence, services are available 24/7 on all devices, no plugins or software installation required.