I opted out of using spyware in the university physics courses I taught last year, and caught my cheating students the old fashioned way. Proctor-spyware, like airport security, is more about theater than effectiveness. You aren't giving the USMLE or a Bar Exam, so you can take the time to write a good exam and evaluate it correctly.
Must all of the cards in the deck be played at each turn? Things cannot simply be bad/user hostile/privacy invading, etc.
Again, I wouldn't chalk any of this up to deliberate bias against any of these groups, but it's all bias anonetheless.
I would especially consider that in the United States we do not have a broad legal right to privacy but there are potentially much stronger tools available if that software skews negative outcomes towards protected categories like sex, disability, or race. From the perspective of a student, job applicant, etc. being asked to use this, if the legal risks cause an organization to stop using it they'll enjoy that as a win even if the outcome isn't a blanket ban.
Not at the expense of grounded reasoning. When I see poorly substantiated claims, it shouldn't, but it really drags the whole rest of the argument down. The argument presented about lawsuits is actually a great example of why I think that's a broken system. They resolve that issue of lost credibility by considering each issue with total, clear, and mandated separation. Outside of that legal world with very well-defined rules, using such tactics reduces credibility.
I should note, that in this particular case, the claim of racial biases is at least substantiated by a believable anecdote.
EDIT: To clarify why I think the legal methodology is broken, its only because the same principles apply to criminal trials. IMO, prosecutors should NOT be throwing poorly substantiated charges at a defendant just to increase their winning probability and make the required defense more expensive.
It should. If someone is willing to make wild, unsubstantiated, claims, it should detract from their credibility.
If the parent comment had said something to the effect of "I should give the benefit of the doubt to a sitting US senator" then you'd have a point, but that context wasn't part of their statement.
Edit: Also, frankly, I wouldn't give the benefit of the doubt to a US senator. If anything, it makes the identity politics feel even more irrelevant.
I wasn't reacting to a summary, I was reacting to an independent premise. The sentence I reacted to, at least the way I read it, was broad to the point of being more of an axiom with which the commenter interpreted the post. As I see it, disagreeing with an axiom is an intellectual engagement. Feel free to counter my disagreement.
> It’s kind of hard to see any definition of “identity politics” which includes the reports but not your emotional reaction to accurate words.
Not entirely sure what you're saying here, but none of what I said was emotional. Simply pointing out that pattern matching is a viable way of filtering other people's thoughts and ideas. If someone makes wild claim, it should change the way you view other claims which may have seemed more rational in their absence. Not really an emotional statement in my mind, but again, feel free to point out which part of this you disagree with and I'd be happy to engage.
As it stands now you aren't really responding to anything I've said, but rather disagreeing that what I'm responding to warrants responding, which is rather tangential.
Case in point, here's someone saying, 'How can you even handwave away systemic racism?' in reply to a comment agreeing that bias exists but is not deliberate: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29164295
Also, the identity politics argument seems to hinder a simple, moral argument against surveillance software as a violation of privacy. The logical implication of the IP argument is that this surveillance software would be okay to use if we manage to work out all the kinks.
It's not the same with general discourse - when you raise a bunch of issues that aren't especially relevant and seem designed to be inflammatory, you damage the credibility of your other arguments. Arguing that test proctoring software is transphobic is such a stretch that it makes you question whether they author has such strong biases against the software that their evaluation of it is just generally too biased to be trustworthy.
It seems like the software is matching people against existing images, based on the issue with the black student, and trans people are I would assume more likely to change their appearance, including as a result of taking hormones and having facial feminization/masculinization surgeries.
Yes, but with some evidence. Otherwise, as a society, this is a bad direction to head in.
You could read the research and refute it, or you could just bluster about things. I know you tried to expand on it in your comment below, but minimizing the specific concerns raised to "isms" and ignoring that at least two of the references in the articles linked and their references for the actual research addressed at least the socioeconomic portion of it, illustrates that you only applied your surface level perspective and criticism.
That being said, there's a rotating list of "badnesses" that are in the zeitgeist and I agree that it's annoying to see them flogged at every opportunity (often w/o much insight).
The statement is at best extremely misleading, and at worse, mostly false. It also represents a juvenile, immature, and myopic perspective on reality.
I would suggest reading "Wealth, Poverty, and Politics" or "Discrimination and Disparities" by Thomas Sowell. He has been debunking the "inequality of outcome therefore racism" logical fallacy for decades.
It seems like you're reading a specific thing I said about a specific scenario and universalizing it in a way you imagine I might universalize it. I'd love to hear a critique of what I actually said, or we could talk about our views of society in a wider way, but I can't respond to this combination of generally dismissing what I said and attacking what you imagine I might think.
I wanna pull this apart a bit because I think it's a good opportunity to talk about how systemic bias gets started. Digital sensor evolution is path-dependent. Technologists developed photo-sites that have "enough" dynamic range for most uses before moving on to increase the resolution on a sensor. What exactly is "enough" depends on your test data.
The sensor on a webcam is only "so big" as you say - but how that sensor balances resolution and photo-site count depends on what conditions they consider acceptable. We could build web cams that would see more pigmented faces better - there is no fundamental limitation in the technology itself. It's that a series of decisions have been made over years of development, generally without people thinking specifically about race at all, and we've arrived at a status quo that has adverse outcomes for people with different skin tones.
There was a similar process that happened with film photography[1]. Not that film, as a technology, is unable to capture dark skin - but that the development standards that were tested and distributed were designed for lighter skin.
Like, I agree that the webcams we have aren't intentionally 'racist.' But I do think that the status quo that has led everyone to accept this balance of dynamic range and resolution is reflective of valuing people with lighter skin more.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/25/lens/sarah-lewis-racial-b...
https://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/a-century...
B) Even if it were simply physics at play, requiring the use of a system known to have physical constraints against darker skin causing failing grades purely on that metric is still pretty racist.
I sense you’re tired of discussions that mention the “cards in the deck”, likely because you aren’t affected by them and therefore care little for them. That’s honestly fair, but there’s value in writing that way to channel outrage into action.
White supremacy: darker skin tones tend to photograph worse than lighter skin tones. Laptop webcams are notoriously crappy and can make this effect worse. Is this white supremacy or physics? Can the test instructions be modified to ask all users to have an appropriate lighting setup (ie lit from above and from the side to ensure that your face is foregrounded properly)
Ableism: for users who require assistive technologies, is it better to take a test in their own space with their own equipment or to travel to a test center and use shared lab equipment? For users with mobility challenges, is it better to be in their own space or travel to a potentially non-accessible testing center?
Sexism: for working mothers, better to take a test in your own home or travel to a testing center and arrange for child care?
Two "isms" seem more relevant but weren’t mentioned: ageism - because fuck boomers, right? Socioeconomics - not everyone has access to a PC that meets the specifications or can acquire one on short notice.
Lots of context is discarded when one engages in polarizing categorical rhetoric. I’m not here shilling for proctoring software but rather for nuanced discourse.
I’m not a photography expert, but it seems to me that cameras are physically equally capable of overexposing an image and underexposing an image. If a particular camera which is used in a facial monitoring system tends to do one rather than the other, I would ask why that is the case.
The choice to use typically terrible cameras in a proctoring system disregarding that it might work ever worse than normally for a subset of people is suspect, yes.
White supremacy is not just bad faith things done by bad people, it is also the assumption that whiteness is the default experience and the failure to account for that not being the case. Similarly with ableism and sexism.
That being said, complaining about the accessibility & inclusiveness of our required surveillance technology does have a dystopian feel to it, lol.
This only works with "new" definitions of racism. It is in fact plainly racist on it's face to demonize a group based on immutable characteristics. It is even worse when actual diversity of though is ignored and people of color are demonized because they don't agree with a race-marxist ideology.
It is in fact plainly racist on it's face to demonize a group based on immutable characteristics.
It is even worse when actual diversity of though is ignored and people of color are demonized because they don't agree with a race-marxist ideology.
I think you just reflexively dismissed this because you saw a basket of words that normally go along with things you disagree with, but the argument is pretty solid.
Really? On the male part? I'd have expected it to do best with women, because I'd have figured facial hair is more difficult to deal with than a wider varieties of hair styles.
In this case, the algorithm is actually bad for all ethnicities [0]. It's just that it's extremely bad for black students (fails half the time) and just regular bad for everyone else (fails a quarter of the time).
[0] https://www.theverge.com/2021/4/8/22374386/proctorio-racial-...
>At the beginning of a test, these products ask students to verify their identity by matching their appearance with a photo ID. As Os Keyes has demonstrated, facial recognition has a terrible history with gender[x]. This means that a software asking students to verify their identity is compromising for students who identify as trans, non-binary, or express their gender in ways counter to cis/heteronormativity. If a student’s gender expression or name on their ID are different from their current gender expression or name, the algorithm may flag them as suspicious. When this happens, they may have to undergo another level of scrutiny to authenticate their identity, an already common and traumatic experience for trans and gender non-conforming students. If these students are not alerted of this possibility before the test begins, it may force them to either discontinue the test and risk their grade, or out themselves to their course owner when they may not want to, risking more trauma and discrimination including being denied financial aid, being forced to leave their institution, or have their lives put in physical danger.
>The Eugenic Gaze is a combination of white supremacy, sexism, ableism, cis/heteronormativity, and xenophobia. When we apply the Eugenic Gaze using technology, the way we do with algorithmic test proctoring, we’re able to codify and reinforce all of those oppressive systems while avoiding equity-based critiques because of our belief in the neutrality of data and technology.
Their recommendations are quite reasonable:
>Don’t use algorithmic test proctoring. Instead, focus on pedagogical techniques that you can use to design assessments, online or in person, that draw from personal experience or require students to apply concepts in unique contexts. If you have to use algorithmic test proctoring, make sure students know about the test settings and ID requirement well before they take a test, and assure them that you will not take any behavior flagged as “suspicious” into consideration that isn’t described explicitly in the syllabus.
The GP link[1] instead calls out "Facial Recognition Tech", and "Algorithmic Proctoring" as being too biased and follows up with a petition[2] to ban these entirely.
[0]: https://hybridpedagogy.org/our-bodies-encoded-algorithmic-te...
[1]: https://library.auraria.edu/news/2021/why-online-test-procto...
[2]: https://www.sheaswauger.com/post/petition-to-ban-facial-reco...
[x]: https://ironholds.org/resources/papers/agr_paper.pdf "The Misgendering Machines: Trans/HCI Implications of Automatic Gender Recognition"
The total time spent in creating a few good, easy to discuss questions, the answering of which would demonstrate understanding, and then reading them, thinking about them, and coming up with a grade, was probably actually less than the amount of time it took to create meaningful multiple choice questions that didn't have any ambiguity, and which weren't easy to intuit the answer even without understanding. Doubly so when we did away with "partial credit" answers, but instead made it so each question was 1 point (or otherwise all or nothing), you had, say, 5 of them, and what we really were looking for was a paragraph that showed understanding (rather than checking off boxes in a rubric of "mentioned A, B, and C"; short essay questions, if you will), an expectation we communicated to the students.
And that's aside from the actual project based grades, which were better still.
By the way, where I work, management pushes for stuff like proctoring, and more students, and "measurable" results, and so on. As a teacher, I don't care much about the whole grading show.
Then the students are not getting what they pay for.
Article proceeds to use a lot of words to not show any of these being true.
I am against it for the general dystopian surveillance normalization it encourages. We don’t need to throw a word salad of made up progressive insults against it to resist its implementation.
Still, ProctorU it's a major deterrence to cheating, I'm just not sure it's worth the cost.