Header image: KF in Dall-E
Notes from Dawson, P. (2021). Defending Assessment Security in a Digital World. Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780429324178
Chapter 7: Surveillance and the weaponisation of academic integrity
- Snowden spoke of ‘suspicionless surveillance’: the widespread and routine application of surveillance to people who were not considered to be doing anything wrong
- Dataveillance: ‘the continuous tracking of (meta)data for unstated preset purposes’
- Call surveillance technology what we will – deterring dishonesty, promoting originality, leveling the playing field – there is no way to honestly call it anything other than forcing students, most of whom we have no reason to suspect, to prove their innocence (Zwagerman, 2008, p. 694).
- Dawson: I’m OK with a degree of surveillance, as long as there is evidence that it actually works.
There’s the rub: See Proctorio/Canvas Q&A – TechDay 2020
(Oct 23 2020, California State University, Fullerton)
Q: Does Proctorio have robust studies showing that it significantly curbs cheating?
A: So, we don’t have any published studies yet. That is something that our marketing team is working with a lot of our partner institutions to try to put together exactly these types of things.
So, NO.
- Citizens’ roles in surveillance have changed, from having surveillance done ‘to’ them, to being active participants in surveillance, such as when we enthusiastically share a picture on social media or virtually check in to a location.
- In surveillance culture, surveillance is part of the status quo, and questioning surveillance or proposing to regulate it is almost a subversive act.
or you get the “if you’ve got nothing to hide” nonsense argument
- Surveillance in education is also sold to students as being ‘for their own good’: without surveillance, all those other students who cheat will pass and your degree will be worthless; and with surveillance, you will gain useful insights into your own work.
- Just as remote proctored examinations might induct students into unsafe cybersecurity practices, as discussed in Chapter 4, higher education’s surveillance culture might also induct students into broader society’s surveillance cultures;
- Academics who are willing to tolerate or support higher education’s surveillance culture, but who are uncomfortable with broader societal surveillance cultures, may wish to think carefully about the effects of university surveillance on students long after they have graduated. What are we teaching through our surveillance culture?
- When Turnitin sold for $1.735 billion in 2019…One critic described the Turnitin sale as part of a pretty common end game for tech companies, especially ones that traffic in human data: create a large base of users, collect their data, monetize that data in ways that help assess its value, leverage that valuation in an acquisition deal (Jesse Stommel, executive director of the Division of Teaching and Learning Technologies at University of Mary Washington, as quoted in Johnson, 2019).
What the MEC Sale Might Really Be About https://thetyee.ca/Analysis/2020/10/06/What-MEC-Sale-Is-Really-About/ Investment firm Kingswood gets a treasure trove of member data with its purchase. What will be done with it?
- Conversely, much of the data collected by educational institutions when stopping cheating could also be of interest to intelligence agencies
How the U.S. Military Buys Location Data from Ordinary Apps https://www.vice.com/en/article/jgqm5x/us-military-location-data-xmode-locate-x
- I think there is every possibility that retrospective use of content-matching or other assessment security tools would find unintentional plagiarism in my undergraduate work. The closer we get to perfect surveillance that can identify any breaches of academic integrity, the more cases of suspected cheating we will find.
- Finally, and most importantly, we need concrete evidence that surveillance approaches actually improve assessment security.