Virtual Proctoring, the Panoptic Gaze, and the Discourse of Academic Integrity
Those of us who operate in ed tech circles, and teaching and learning circles, more broadly, are constantly exposed to and subjected to (and sometimes the source of) continual discourse surrounding the idea of academic integrity, which is thinly-veiled code for preventing cheating. It’s a highly problematic concept that frames students as immoral, lazy, and irresponsible and positions educators as oppositional figures who must continually find new and creative ways to battle these awful, terrible students, often through proprietary technologies.
Take this tweet, for example.
SafeAssign, a Blackboard product, plainly and simply, gives you a quantitative indication, generated from an unknown algorithm, of how much a student has plagiarized on a written assignment. It is inherently, fundamentally disciplinary and punitive. But this article (sponsored by Blackboard, of course) suggests that we can use it to “teach them proper citation and how to improve their original writing,” even though SafeAssign only manages to do anything at all after a student has submitted something. This nonsense is then perpetuated by folks like those at GSVU eLearning, who seem to accept it and repeat it uncritically.
I feel very strongly that responsible and critical educators should question,call out, and resist intrusions in our spaces that are antithetical to educational endeavors, particularly when they are motivated by corporate profits.
To that end, below is some short, unrefined brain dump I composed a few months back about this discourse of academic integrity in general and plagiarism detection’s close cousin, virtual proctoring. It’s somewhere between recorded stream-of-consciousness and a first draft. It’s a start of a start of something I’ll come back to later.
In short, I suggest that our efforts to catch and punish cheaters is what creates them in the first place, and we need to critically re-examine our roles in the context of what “integrity” should mean.
Kind thanks to my colleague Nathalie Molina, who has been helping me work through some of these preliminary ideas; we’re hoping, at some point to expand this together into some more serious writing or a conference session.
Virtual proctoring, in which students are observed by a proctor through a webcam while taking an examination over the Internet, is a method of mitigating cheating and promoting academic integrity during high stakes assessments that is steadily growing in popularity in distance education courses, hybrid courses, and traditional face-to-face courses alike. These online proctoring platforms are offered by a number of corporations who each offer a variation on the theme. Typically, in a virtual proctoring setup, the student will log in to proctoring service’s environment, verify that his or her microphone and webcam are working properly, show to a live proctor the student’s test-taking environment through the webcam to ensure that no prohibited materials are nearby, authenticate his or her identify through a series of challenge questions pulled from the student’s credit background, allow the proctor to take control of his or her computer remotely to close any prohibited programs, and finally begin the exam. Oftentimes, the student pays a fee for the privilege of taking the exam under the surveillance of the proctor. During the exam, the proctor will monitor a number of test-takers at once; the test-taker does not know how many students the proctor is watching simultaneously or whether the proctor is watching him or her at any given moment to note a breach of academic integrity. The test-taker is compelled, at all times, to act as though the proctor is watching.
Virtual proctoring, in a quite literal fashion, resembles the idea of the panopticon, an architectural design for a prison in which cells are arranged on the edges of a circular or semi-circular structure, facing inward toward a central guard tower. In the guard tower, the overseer can surveil any particular cell at any given moment, but the inmates are unable to discern whether the overseer is watching him or her at any given moment to note a breach in the rules of prison. The inmate is compelled, at all times, to act as though the overseer is watching.
The panopticon was proposed by philosopher Jeremy Bentham in the eighteenth century as a system of perfect control over prisoners. In Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, Foucault’s history of the development of the penal state, he notes that the major effect of the panopticon is:
to induce in the inmate a state of conscious and permanent visibility that assures the automatic functioning of power. So to arrange things that the surveillance is permanent in its effects, even if it is discontinuous in its action that the perfection of power should tend to render its actual exercise unnecessary; that this architectural apparatus should be a machine for creating and sustaining a power relation independent of the person who exercises it; in short, that the inmates should be caught up in a power situation of which they are themselves the bearers. To achieve this, it is at once too much and too little that the prisoner should be constantly observed by an inspector: too little, for what matters is that he knows himself to be observed; too much, because he has no need in fact of being so. In view of this, Bentham laid down the principle that power should be visible and unverifiable. Visible: the inmate will constantly have before his eyes the tall oudine of the central tower from which he is spied upon. Unverifiable: the inmate must never know whether he is being looked at at any one moment; but he must be sure that he may always be so. (p. 201)
In a virtual proctoring environment, the technologies employed are different from the penal version of panopticon (the webcam and microphone versus the architectural arrangement of the prison), but the relations of disciplinary power are the same. The behavior of students is controlled and manipulated, via their own webcams, in a type of panoptic gaze.
The need to surveil students while taking tests is invariably tied to the idea of high stakes assessments of learning, that is, the stakes of a test are so high that students’ identities must be verified and they must be watched to ensure that they do not consult prohibited materials or other people. Students must abide by an expectation for a specific performance of behavior privileging memorization, not resourcefulness. But, while it is ostensibly designed to punish criminals and prevent crime, the prison, as Foucault explains, serves to create criminals, by forcing inmates into meaningless work, subjecting them to the “arbitrary power of administration” (p. 266), creating the conditions amenable to the formation of criminal organizations, and releasing them under conditions that leave them unable to find legitimate employment (pp. 264–268). Similarly, the invasive disciplinary technology of virtual proctoring in the context of high stakes assessments does not mitigate cheating — it creates cheaters by shaping environments that bring them into being.
The ideas of “mitigating cheating” and “preventing academic misconduct” exist in the framework of what is commonly referred to as academic integrity, which is used as a shorthand for responsibilizing students to act in ways that are expected by the institution — to exhibit obedience to authority, particularly in matters of assessment of learning. Cheating and plagiarism are the two rallying cries of academic integrity, and academic integrity signals the officially sanctioned role of students under these headings. The role of faculty members and institutions in the discourse of academic integrity is superficial; they are expected to “promote a culture” of academic integrity at their institutions or “foster environments” in which students can behave correctly.
However, in keeping with the basic idea of integrity as a term meaning “doing the right thing,” we should seek an alternative framing of the discourse of academic integrity, one that inverts the responsibilization. College teachers, as the primary effectuators of power and authority in academic environments, should uphold academic integrity — should do the right thing in academic contexts — by designing learning environments that do not create cheaters; by incorporating forms of teaching that privilege authenticity and critical thinking rather than high stakes testing.
