Taking tests remotely is a problem. That doesn’t mean technology is the solution.
Dear readers, please be extra careful online on Friday. The news that President Trump has tested positive for the coronavirus created the kind of fast-moving information environment in which we might be inclined to read and share false or emotionally manipulative material online. It’s happening already. I found this from The Verge and this from The Washington Post to be helpful guides to avoid contributing to online confusion, unhelpful arguments and false information. A good rule of thumb: If you have a strong emotional reaction to something, step away from your screen. Technology is not more fair or more capable than people. Sometimes we shouldn’t use it at all. That’s the message from Meredith Broussard, a computer scientist, artificial intelligence researcher and professor in data journalism at New York University. We discussed the recent explosion of schools relying on technology to monitor remote students taking tests. Broussard told me this is an example of people using technology all wrong. My colleagues reported this week on software designed to flag students cheating on tests by doing things like tracking eye movements via a webcam. Students told my colleagues and other journalists that it felt callous and unfair to be suspected of cheating because they read test questions aloud, had snacks on their desks or did other things that the software deemed suspicious. Monitoring test taking is never going to be flawless, and the pandemic has forced many schools into imperfect accommodations for virtual education. But Broussard said the underlying problem is that people too often misapply technology as a solution when they should be approaching the problem differently. Instead of finding invasive, imperfect software to keep the test-taking process as normal as possible in wildly abnormal times, what if schools ditched closed-book tests during a pandemic, she suggested. “Remote education needs to look a little bit different, and we can all adapt,” Broussard told me. Broussard, who wrote about the misuse of software to assign student grades for The New York Times’s Opinion section, also said that schools need to have the option to try software for test proctoring and other uses, assess if it’s helping students and ditch it without financial penalty if it isn’t.
