It is clear that at least some of these flags are technical issues with ExamSoft. These summaries are decidedly vague: “Facial view of your eyes was not within view of the camera for a prolonged period of time” “No audible sound was detected” “Leaving the view of the webcam outside of scheduled breaks during a remote-proctored exam.” Examinees do not currently have access to the flagged videos themselves, and are not expected to receive access to them, or any other evidence against them, before they are required to submit a response. In a depressingly ironic introduction to the legal system, the Bar has requested that students respond to the notices within 10 days, but it would appear that none of them have been given enough information to do so, as Chapter 6 Notices contain only a short summary of the violation.
Many only learned about the flag after receiving an official “Chapter 6 Notice” from the Bar, which is sent when an applicant is observed (supposedly) violating exam conduct rules or seen or heard with prohibited items, like a cell phone, during the exam. These flags have triggered concern for hundreds, if not thousands, of test takers, most of whom had no idea that they were flagged until recently. While examinees have been searching for help from other examinees as well as hiring legal counsel in their attempt to defend themselves from potentially baseless claims of cheating, the California Committee of Bar Examiners has said “everything is going well” and called these results “a good thing to see” ( 13:30 into the video of the Committee meeting). In this case, the harm is not only to the students who are rightfully upset about the implications and the lack of proper channels for redress, but to the institution of the Bar itself.
#Exam soft software#
Far more likely is that, as EFF and others have said before, remote proctoring software is surveillance snake oil-you simply can’t replicate a classroom environment online, and attempting to do so via algorithms and video monitoring only causes harm. It goes without saying that of the 3,190 applicants flagged by the software, the vast majority were not cheating. Last week, the California Bar released data confirming our fear of false positives: during its use of ExamSoft for the October Bar exam, over one-third of the nearly nine-thousand online examinees were flagged by the software ( 13:00 into the video of the California Committee of Bar Examiners meeting).
One of EFF’s chief concerns about exam proctoring software-in addition to the fact that it subjects students to excessive surveillance-is the risk that it will incorrectly flag students for cheating, called “false positives.” This can be due either to the software’s technical failures or to its requirements that students have relatively new computers and access to near-broadband speeds.
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