TUM’s problematic view on online exams

With uni­ver­si­ties mas­sive­ly turn­ing to online teach­ing, there is a lot of dis­cus­sion regard­ing exams, and pro­pos­als for tech-enabled, remote­ly proc­tored exam­i­na­tions are often prop­ping up.

I came across this deck of slides (archive) titled “Prü­fun­gen von zuhause aus? Geht das?” (“Exams from home? Is that pos­si­ble?”), authored in May 2019 by the cen­ter for teach­ing and learn­ing of the Teschnis­che Uni­ver­sität München (TUM). It is noth­ing short of horrifying.

There are only two instances of stu­dents in this TUM pre­sen­ta­tion: a smil­ing woman sit­ting on her bed, and a hand­ful of cheaters.

Sure­ly the author could have con­sid­ered the real­i­ty of going through an online proc­tored exam for the peo­ple who are at the heart of it: the students.

I am mild­ly nau­se­at­ed by this dis­cus­sion of var­i­ous deep sur­veil­lance tech­ni­cal sys­tems that some­how man­ages not to include a dis­cus­sion of ethics. Dump­ing it all on stu­dent con­sent is cheap and careless.

I’d care for a descrip­tion of the poten­tial for abuse, the risk of loss of con­trol of data, the lack of over­sight, and of the deep­er human right con­cerns asso­ci­at­ed with giv­ing a for-prof­it third par­ty access to the most inti­mate aspects of people’s lives. Drew Har­well cov­ers this well in the Wash­ing­ton Post this month: Mass school clo­sures in the wake of the coro­n­avirus are dri­ving a new wave of stu­dent sur­veil­lance.
After that we could per­haps dis­cuss the issue of fuel­ing deep dis­trust and con­tempt between teach­ers and learners.

Instead, in this deck of slides, we are shown a total­i­tar­i­an state’s dream sys­tem (face recog­ni­tion, eye move­ment track­ing, fin­ger­print­ing, type pat­tern analy­sis, remote stor­age of video record­ings, remote con­trol of per­son­al devices, you name it) with flow charts that have smi­leys in them.

It’s not flat­ter­ing for the TUM to release a doc­u­ment like this. We have ethics com­mit­tees for things as small as pace­mak­ers or ABS brak­ing sys­tems. Peo­ple of TUM. Think­ing of that was part of the actu­al homework.