Concordia University is undermining the privacy rights of its students and this must stop

I was lucky enough to go to Concordia University. It is a world-class institution with accomplished professors and intelligent, creative students. Some of the smartest people in the world have gone through Concordia, including some of the smartest people I know. Oh and for all you Arrested Development fans out there, this guy also went to Concordia:

The administration also cares a lot about their students. They recently launched a $500,000 COVID-19 Emergency Student Relief Fund to help alleviate economic hardships during this time.

But, the administration is currently taking actions that undermine their students’ privacy and digital rights. Concordia University is requiring students who need to take a closed-book exam to download and use the video-surveillance and facial-recognition tool: Proctorio.

Proctorio’s software monitors students’ webcams, microphones and desktops, and records their video, audio, and screen activity as they write their exams at home. Some exams even require students to do a 360-degree scan of their room with their webcams before writing. The software then tracks and analyses students’ behaviour like their “speech and eye movements, how long they took to complete the test and how many times they clicked the mouse.” It then flags “suspicious behaviour” allegedly indicative of academic dishonesty and provides this to professors in a report “ranking test-takers by ‘suspicion level.’”

Not only is it wrong to require students to be subject to this kind of surveillance, monitoring, and scrutiny, it also likely offends Canadian privacy laws for two reasons:

1. Proctorio is not getting manifest, free, and enlightened consent from Concordia University’s students for the collection and use of their personal information; and,
2. Online, closed-book exams are not necessary for Concordia University to provide its services.

Lack of manifest, free, and enlightened consent

In Québec, private companies must get “manifest, free, and enlightened” consent from individuals before collecting their personal information. This means that:

individuals should be made aware of all purposes for which information is collected, used or disclosed. At a minimum, they must be informed of purposes in sufficient detail such as to ensure they meaningfully understand what they are invited to consent to. These purposes must be described in meaningful language, avoiding vagueness like ‘service improvement’ [emphasis added].

Proctorio does not provide sufficient detail for students to meaningfully understand what they are consenting to. For one, it does not sufficiently elaborate on the type of behaviour its software considers suspicious. Does rolling your eyes suggest you’re cheating? What if you scratch your nose or stretch? What if you work out a problem by hand? What if you throw up? True story.

Also, the company does not readily make available the research behind its software. How did Proctorio determine which behaviours are indicative of cheating? Did their studies involve participants from various ethnic and cultural backgrounds? After all, facial expressions that may be considered suspicious in one culture may be normal behaviour in another, and Concordia University has a very diverse student population.

Without this knowledge, students cannot provide manifest, free, and enlightened consent to using Proctorio’s software because they do not meaningfully understand what they are consenting to. Are they consenting to a machine that will fairly and accurately assess if they are cheating? Or, are they consenting to a tool based on shoddy science, one biased against certain races (i.e. COMPAS) or genders (i.e. Amazon’s now-scrapped HR recruiting tool)?

Also, Concordia University does not provide its students with any reasonable alternatives to using Proctorio. Currently, it lets students avoid writing their final exams and get a grade based on completed work. However, professors aren’t required to re-assign the weight of the final exam against completed work. So, students can still get a zero on a final exam worth 20% or more of their final grade. Alternatively, the administration lets students defer their exam but states that their deferred exam may still “take place online, using online proctoring.” In other words, damned if you do, damned if you don’t.

Online, closed-book exams are unnecessary

Article 64 of the Act Respecting Access to Documents Held by Public Bodies and the Protection of Personal Information — which governs Concordia University’s collection, use, and disclosure of its students’ personal information — states that:

No person may, on behalf of a public body, collect personal information if it is not necessary for the exercise of the rights and powers of the body or the implementation of a program under its management [emphasis added].

Concordia University’s collection and use of its students’ personal information through Proctorio is unnecessary. Online, closed-book exams are not the only way — or even the best way — to evaluate a student’s knowledge of course material. Concordia University has other viable options available. Take, for example, the three alternatives the University of Saskatchewan encourages its faculty to use instead of online, closed-book exams:

1. No Final Assessment: the University asks its instructors to assess if students have already shown “what is essential for [them] to know or be able to do at the end of [the] course [and] not everything [the instructor] may have wanted them to know before COVID-19.” If instructors assess that this is the case, the University encourages them to consider foregoing the final assessment and reweighing “existing assignments to determine a final grade.”
2. Assignments instead of a final exam: the University encourages its instructors to consider different forms of assessments instead of a final exam. It writes that papers, projects, performance tasks, or portfolios of classwork can easily substitute final exams and are often more appropriate.
3. Open-book final exam: the University encourages its instructors to consider making their final exam untimed and open-book, writing that “many questions…can be moved directly to an open-book exam from a closed-book exam with minor revisions.”

Only after these options have been thoroughly investigated and determined unsuitable can instructors consider using online, closed-book exams. However, the University emphasizes that the use of this option should be rare and makes it contingent on the Dean’s approval. Furthermore, the University discourages using services that use cameras on computers to watch students in their homes because of “legal and privacy implications.”

As such, it’s unlikely that an online, closed-book exam — and therefore the use of Proctorio — is necessary for Concordia University to provide its services. Other forms of assessment are available which easily substitute closed-book final exams and are possibly even better at measuring a student’s understanding of course material.

Concordia must respect the privacy rights of its students & stop using Proctorio

What Concordia University is doing, and how they’re doing it, is wrong and undermines the privacy rights of its students. The use of Proctorio needs to be suspended until Proctorio can get manifest, free, and enlightened consent from students and Concordia University can demonstrate that online, closed-book exams are absolutely necessary.

Look, I get it. We all must make sacrifices because of the coronavirus outbreak. But, being quarantined does not mean students have to be isolated from their privacy rights. Extraordinary times call for extraordinary measures, but a pandemic shouldn’t create pandemonium.

Oh, and by the way, students can’t go to the bathroom while taking one of Proctorio’s online exams…

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