Over 4700 signatures against the LockDown Browser at U of G

Concerns arise over Respondus programs adding additional academic stress and disadvantaging anxious students and students of colour

It’s no surprise that the transition to virtual learning has been a challenging one.

However, a petition with over 4700 signatures against the use of LockDown Browser and proctored exam software at the University of Guelph shows that students are finding some of their virtual struggles to be unnecessary.

According to their website, LockDown Browser refers to the proctored exam software owned by Respondus, an educational software company. Used by some university faculty, the program requires installation on an electronic device, such as a computer or mobile phone,  and locks the student’s test page browser to prevent cheating.

Over 1500 academic institutions utilize LockDown Browser, and the program proctors over 120 million exams annually. Respondus also has an audio and visual monitoring program called Respondus Monitor, which can be used in conjunction with LockDown Browser.

VP Academic of the Central Students Association (CSA) Sean Mitchell has received concerns from students about how the programs operate.

Over 1500 academic institutions utilize LockDown Browser, and the program proctors over 120 million exams annually.

“Respondus [LockDown Browser] operates in such a way that restricts students’ use of their computer to only the Respondus browser that displays their assessment, while [Respondus Monitor] monitors keystrokes, and video and audio input from their webcam,” Mitchell told The Ontarion. “The video and audio is supposed to function by detecting potential academic misconduct through automated sound and video monitoring.”

Respondus Monitor does this by using facial recognition technology to detect if the student looks away from the exam. It also enables the recording of any audio to ensure that no one is speaking during the exam.

If the monitor program sees the student looking away from the exam or hears any noise, it “flags” the disruption so that professors can review the footage later. LockDown Browser also locks the user out from all other computer programs until the assignment is complete.

Respondus Monitor is an add-on to the LockDown Browser and further reinforces the amount of proctoring during examinations. The primary difference between the two is that Respondus Monitor allows university faculty to require a “startup sequence” from students before the exam begins. Depending on the professor’s customization, this sequence can include a 360 degree webcam scan of the room where the student will be conducting the exam in. The monitor can also be enabled to record the student throughout the duration of their exam.

This is where the problem starts for many local students.

Change.org user “UofG Students” started the petition to “stop the use of ‘LockDown Browser’ at the University of Guelph” and listed the ‘University of Guelph’, ‘President Yates’, and ‘University of Guelph Students’ as their decision-makers.

The petition states that “although it is understood and fair for the faculty to have some restrictions on exams, the spyware currently in place is extremely invasive. Having students write an exam while being recorded and having their browser locked adds enormous stress and anxiety to the exam.

“Every student has different levels of test anxiety and corresponding techniques to help keep calm and focused during an exam,” says the petition. “For example, jotting notes on scrap paper, glancing away from the exam, or speaking out loud, all which are not permitted in most lockdown exams.”

The petition also states that a quiet workspace, stable Wi-Fi, and a computer with a working webcam and microphone are not always available for some students. Additionally, it also claims that “force-quitting” background programs during examinations “takes a huge toll on the hardware and performance of our devices.”

“New methods for online exams and tests that do not require downloads and such invasive spyware should be used for efficiency of test taking, and the privacy of students.”

U of G student Lauryn Prummel has experienced some of these problems when using the Respondus programs in her computer applications, philosophy, and bio-medical science classes.

Prummel said that Respondus programs make it difficult for her to focus on the material as she is constantly worrying about having a stable internet connection and minimizing her movements.

“This anxiety causes me to perform worse than on in-class exams,” Prummel told The Ontarion. “In a lecture hall, you can look up for a moment to think, or take a sip of your water without worry of being ‘flagged.’

“I understand in these times, exams need to be structured in such a way to prevent cheating, I just wish our school could come up with a way to do this without requiring students to download this software to our computers.”

U of G student Laura Pacziga has also used Respondus programs in several science classes, and has signed the petition. In particular, she takes issue with how “unfair it is to international students, who pay [an overpriced tuition] just to get up at 3 a.m. to take a monitored exam.”

Furthermore, according to Mitchell the CSA has received “concerns brought forward by [students of colour] detailing how they have been flagged at a higher rate for academic misconduct within the app than their white peers.”

Stanford University professors James Zou and Londa Schiebinger wrote in a 2018 Nature article that facial recognition services are prone to these kinds of mistakes.

Namely, artificial intelligence (AI) programs that power facial recognition technology go through “training data” in which they scour databases for millions of images to learn what faces look like in order to identify them. But due to the over-representation of some groups, the program becomes culturally and ethnically biased.

According to the article, “More than 45 per cent of ImageNet data, which fuels research in computer vision, comes from the United States, home to only four per cent of the world’s population. By contrast, China and India together contribute just three per cent of ImageNet data, even though these countries represent 36 per cent of the world’s population.”

The algorithms used in these AI programs are also prone to becoming biased. The article explains that when the program becomes more successful at recognizing data from a certain group of individuals, it will begin to “optimize for those individuals” and primarily train itself on those groups of people.

These errors in facial recognition software are why people of colour are less frequently recognized by Respondus Monitor and subsequently flagged more often.

Consequently, Guelph students aren’t the only ones upset over academic institutions utilizing Respondus programs. Similar concerns are expressed by students at the University of Ottawa, the University of Albany, and the University of North Carolina in Charlotte.

While the U of G does not require all of its faculty to use Respondus programs, it does make it “available to any course site on CourseLink,” according to the University’s Respondus LockDown Browser support page. All it takes is to enable the programs, but not all professors are keen to utilize them.

Joshua August “Gus” Skorburg is an assistant professor at the U of G whose focus is on the ethics of emerging technologies, like AI. While he hadn’t heard of the local petition against the Respondus programs, he decided against enabling them in his courses.

“Maybe I’m naive,” said Skorburg. “I’m in my first year teaching at U of G, after all — but I tend to try to trust students and give them the benefit of the doubt.”

When asked whether he thought the U of G should stop utilizing the programs, Skorburg said, “there are lots of different kinds of classes, taught by very different kinds of professors, with diverse learning outcomes. So I doubt there is a one-size-fits-all answer.

“Assuming that worries about students’ privacy are legitimate, are there less invasive methods that are similarly effective in reducing cheating? I have not researched Respondus extensively, but my intuition is that the answer to this question is ‘yes.’”

Regarding the discriminatory biases of the programs, Mitchell said that it is “not enough to ‘not be racist,’ but that we must be anti-racist and fight for equality for all members of our society.”

For upcoming semesters Mitchell will be advocating for the following on behalf of the CSA:

• Alternative assessment options for professors to use and resources to allow them to make appropriate changes.
• Guidance on modification to existing course outlines that include Respondus.
• Rejection of W21 course outlines that include the use of lockdown browsers and automated proctoring services for more than 10 per cent of the course assessments.

Interestingly, these solutions don’t necessarily conflict with Respondus’ own Data Privacy Overview. Respondus clarifies that data like video recordings are owned by the academic institutions and not by Respondus itself. As a result, the company does not have access to student data, and only the course instructor (or those with higher credentials) has access to recordings after the exam has taken place.

According to Jodi Feeney, Chief Operations Officer at Respondus, Amazon Web Service is used to ensure cloud data security. Additionally, third-party penetration testing is performed on LockDown Browser and Respondus Monitor once a year or more depending on any “architecture changes,” and the company “has obtained SOC 2 Type 1 certification which illustrates a rigorous commitment to security and privacy.”

Respondus received this certification from being a participant of the Higher Education Community Vendor Assessment Toolkit (HECVAT) which, according to EDUCAUSE, is a questionnaire framework that measures vendor risk.

As for the claims on ethnically-biased facial recognition software, Feeney states that Respondus isn’t providing a response at this time since they cannot give the concern “the weight it needs.”

“This is a question we take seriously and is certainly top-of-mind with researchers in our field and with our development team,” Feeney said.

“We have engaged with individual institutions to address questions they have around this issue. There isn’t a quick answer to this question, and we don’t want our replies taken out of context or generalized.”

She also stated that the flagging system in Respondus Monitor “doesn’t indicate a student has cheated. It simply provides information to the instructor to help them determine if an exam violation has occurred.”

“If a student chooses not to accept the terms or is not comfortable using the service, the institution (or the instructor) would need to determine whether there is an alternate option for completing the exam,” Feeney said. “It is up to the institution to determine their policies around when a student does not agree to its use – Respondus does not require the use of the applications.”

As for students worried about their private spaces being recorded, Feeney suggests hanging a sheet or blanket behind them or placing their backs to a wall during exams.

Some professors, like Skorburg, are utilizing take-home or open-book exams, highlighting a few options for the U of G should the local petition reach its 5,000 signature goal.

“I’ve had all of two take-home exams,” said Pacziga. “But I honestly feel like that works better for everyone. I haven’t done better on those necessarily, but I do feel like I’m being tested fairly.”

 

A version of this article appeared in print in The Ontarion issue 189.4 on Nov. 26, 2020.

Banner photos courtesy of Unsplash and Iconfinder.

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