John,

During the pandemic, college students have been subjected to a horrific amount of surveillance in test-taking. Now, Proctorio and textbook company McGraw-Hill Education want to make filming yourself for racially-biased “cheat detection” algorithms not just a part of test-taking, but a part of doing homework every day. ¹

We and our friends at ParentsTogether just sent an open letter² from 2000+ parents to demand that McGraw-Hill terminate its relationship with Proctorio. Will you stand with students and demand the same?

EMAIL MCGRAW-HILL

Proctorio and their creepy CEO have spent 2020 behaving like digital supervillains. They’re suing teachers, intimidating students, and posting private student info on Reddit. They’ve abused Twitter’s DMCA takedown process to remove critical tweets, all the while their software has been denying dark-skinned students access to tests. And those are just the bad things we know about—where there’s smoke, there’s fire. Proctorio should be investigated immediately. ^{3 4 5 6 7}

A shady company like Proctorio would never have infected colleges and universities so quickly without help from McGraw-Hill’s near-monopoly on the textbook market. Motivated by greed for another profit stream, their alliance pairs textbooks with Proctorio, encouraging untrained and unsupervised professors to subject students to a rights-infringing level of deeply flawed surveillance.

In this equation, students always lose. If they resist at all, they could face consequences with their professors. If they don’t speak up about problems, their access to education could suffer. McGraw-Hill cannot claim the values of inclusion and diversity while peddling this software that denies the privacy rights of all students and compromises the educational experience of diverse students.

If McGraw-Hill were to end their partnership with Proctorio, they would send the signal to universities and surveillance capitalists alike: proctoring apps have no place in education.

Let’s have at ‘em, shall we?

Lia & the team at ❤️Fight

PS: We also have a petition on proctoring apps. If you haven’t already, please sign it as well!

Footnotes:

1. Edsurge: https://www.edsurge.com/news/2020-11-13-pushback-is-growing-against-automated-proctoring-services-but-so-is-their-use

2. Fight for the Future: https://www.fightforthefuture.org/news/2020-12-17-2000-parents-call-on-mcgraw-hill-publishing-to-end/

3. The Ubyssey: https://www.ubyssey.ca/news/proctorio-sues-linkletter/

4. Vice: https://www.vice.com/en/article/n7wxvd/students-are-rebelling-against-eye-tracking-exam-surveillance-tools

5. Washington Post: https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/11/12/test-monitoring-student-revolt/

6. MSN: https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/technology/proctorio-used-dmca-to-take-down-a-students-critical-tweets/ar-BB1aJpvS

7. MIT Technology Review: https://www.technologyreview.com/2020/08/07/1006132/software-algorithms-proctoring-online-tests-ai-ethics/

Fight for the Future works to protect your rights in the digital age.