Thread by @doctorow

The pandemic presented an opportunity to reconsider our seemingly immutable assumptions about life - for adults, anyway. We got the Great Resignation and "hybrid" work-from-home. Our kids got remote learning. Ugh. 1/

Don't get me wrong: remote learning has advantages, especially for kids coping with physical/mental health issues; engaged with non-school interests; or escaping a discriminatory and bullying environment (this isn't as good as *addressing* discrimination and bullying, but…). 2/

But the remote learning boom has emboldened the absolute worst in the ed-tech sector. It's not just that these companies are price-gouging our schools and normalizing surveillance for kids. 3/

They're reinforcing everything terrible about educational assessment, and (incredibly), making it even worse.

High-stakes test-taking is widely understood to have little pedagogical value. 4/

To the extent that it measures learning, it only does so for one chunk of learners, and all too often, it's just measuring test-taking ability. In other words, scoring high on a high-stakes test can mean that you're good at tests, or that you understand the material. 5/

Scoring low can mean that you're bad at tests, or that you don't understand the material. High-stakes tests advance a cohort of good-at-test kids and good-at-the subject kids. 6/

They flunk a cohort of bad-at-test kids (who may be *great* at the subject) as well as kids who haven't mastered the material.

It's not like there aren't alternatives. 7/

Pedagogists have a whole arsenal of continuous assessment and project-based tools for measuring their students' progress.

papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cf… 8/

These have several advantages over high-stakes testing. For one thing, they *work*, even in remote learning contexts. High-stakes testing, on the other hand, is even worse when it's remote:

pluralistic.net/2021/06/24/pro… 9/

Obviously. High-stakes testing starts from the presumption that students are their teachers' adversaries, and must be prevented from "cheating." 10/

That's hard enough to manage when the test is taken under controlled conditions, but it's absurd when the test is being taken in the student's own home. 11/

For some adults, the pandemic was a chance to exercise agency: to quit their jobs, or demand better working conditions and more flexibility. Not so for kids. 12/

Just as remote learning was creating an opportunity to end the pedagogical nonsense of high-stakes testing, the "remote invigilation" industry deployed an army of grinning, bullshitting salesdroids to convince school systems to double down on remote testing. 13/

Chief among these is @Proctorio, a company whose sleaze cannot be overstated. Proctorio leads the "remote invigilation" industry, which forces students to install spyware on their computers to oversee their test-taking. 14/

This software uses "facial recognition" (which can't recognize Black faces unless students aim multiple task lights directly into their eyes) to monitor students. 15/

The facial recognition is used to punish students who look away while taking their tests (for example, looking up or to one side while thinking).

A remote invigilation session begins with a student being forced to show all parts of their room to a live human overseer. 16/

Students who live in cramped quarters - say, students who share a room with an "essential worker" who works night shifts - are forced to invade the privacy and interrupt the activities of their family members. 17/

Students who live in broadband deserts - like the kids in California who were forced to take their tests in a Taco Bell parking lot where they could get free wifi - are punished for broadband companies' unwillingness to serve their communities. 18/

The live operator doesn't always disappear after a kid exposes their room. Sometimes, live operators virtually stare over students' shoulders as they take their tests. 19/

Sometimes, these impatient, invisible overseers reach into test-takers' computers to jiggle their mouses, as a goad to get them to move on.

What if you have a disability and need to stand up, go to the toilet, or throw up from anxiety? 20/

Or (I'm not making this up) experience labor pains? Tough. Proctorio and its competitors have no way to accommodate you, and so they flag you and flunk you.

A lot of these facts came to light thanks to whistleblowers like Ian @Linkletter. 21/

When Linkletter was an ed-tech specialist tasked with evaluating Proctorio's products, he discovered a horrifying set of "features" that were not in the company's public disclosures. 22/

Linkletter tweeted about these, including links to the company's publicly accessible (but unlisted) Youtube videos. The company sued him for copyright infringement and other flimsy pretexts that were clearly aimed at silencing a critic:

pluralistic.net/2020/10/17/pro… 23/

Even thought Linkletter raised more than CAD85,000 and invoked British Columbia's anti-SLAPP law, he is *still* in court, a year and a half later:

gofundme.com/f/stand-agains…

Proctorio doesn't confine its bullying to adult educators. 24/

The company's CEO *personally doxed a child* who complained about his products on a Reddit forum:

pluralistic.net/2020/07/01/bos…

Remember, Proctorio bills itself as being on the vanguard of the "educational integrity" movement. 25/

But "integrity" takes on a very different meaning when the goal is to secure the "integrity" of the *test* and not the integrity of the *learning*. In the former case, the student is an enemy to be outsmarted. In the latter, the student is a partner to be enlisted. 26/

High-stakes testing profiteers like Proctorio justify deceptive, bullying tactics by painting learners as "cheats" - a species of presumptive criminal who needs to be pre-emptively incarcerated in its digital prisons. 27/

This distortion of the learning process carries over into every sector of the "educational integrity" industry. Take @Honorlock, a high-ticket ed-tech profiteer that "is revolutionizing the academic integrity of online assessment." 28/

Honorlock is an also-ran competitor of Proctorio. In its effort to differentiate itself from the market-leading abuser, they have found new ways to victimize and deceive learners in the name of "integrity." 29/

A new investigation by @themarkup's @colinlecher unravels a secret operation by Honorlock to entrap students with "honeypot" web-sites that purport to give the answers to test questions, but actually just nark students out to their profs:

themarkup.org/machine-learni… 30/

The scam was uncovered by Kurt Wilson, a CS major at the University of Central Florida, who became obsessed with learning more about how his tuition money was being spent. He found at least five deceptive Honorlock-linked websites that pretended to be answers sites. 31/

Lecher quotes experts, like U Calgary's Sarah Eaton, who call this "entrapment" and point out the irony of a company that monitors "integrity" engaging in deception. 32/

@Parntherc likens it to profs putting the answer key on the corner of a test-taker's desk and penalizing them if they look at it. 33/

Universities spend hundreds of thousands of dollars for Honorlock services - money that could be spent developing and supporting assessment techniques that treat students as learners, not cheaters, and provide a better picture of each student's progress with the material. 34/

But that would involve pedagogical integrity - the kind of integrity that puts learning, not ease of assessment, first. 35/

It would mean funding teachers, not VC-backed ed-tech profiteers seeking a return on their backers' investment. It requires that students be treated as partners, not adversaries. 36/

Image:
Cryteria (modified)
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CC BY 3.0:
creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.…

Insight Pest (modified):
insightpest.com

CC BY-SA 2.0:
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r 37/

ETA - If you'd like an unrolled version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

pluralistic.net/2022/02/16/una…