Students of color are being referred to teachers because the Proctorio testing software cannot see them

Procterio, a piece of exam monitoring software designed to monitor during exams, which relies on open-source software that has a history of racial bias issues, According to a report by Motherboard. The issue was discovered by a student who discovered how the software detected the face, and found that it fails to recognize the black face in half the time.

Proctorio, and other programs like it, are designed to keep an eye on students while they are taking tests. However, Many Students of color have reported That they Have problems obtaining software To Look at their faces – Occasionally happen Resort to excessive measures Obtaining software to identify them. This can potentially lead to students’ problems: Proctorio will flag To train them If it does not detect their face.

After realistically hearing about these issues, Akash Sathesan decided to look into methods of face detection, which the software was using. They found that it recognizes and performs OpenCV, An open-source computer vision program that can be used to identify faces There were issues of racial bias in the past) Belongs to. Knowing this, he ran tests using OpenCV and designed a machine set designed to validate how machine visual algorithms behave with diverse faces. According to his second blog post

The results were not good.

Graph: Akash Sathesan, ProctorNinja

Not only did the software fail to recognize black faces more than half the time, it was not particularly good at recognizing faces of any ethnicity – the highest hit rate was less than 75 percent. In its report, Motherboard Contacted a security researcher, who was able to validate both Satheson’s results and analysis. The proctorio itself also confirms that it uses OpenCV. On its license page, Though it does not go into detail about how.

A Proctorio spokesperson said in a statement to the motherboard that tests by Satheson prove that the software is only visible for face detection, no. Identify the identities associated with them. Well this can be a (small) rest for students Who can be concerned about privacy issues Related to proctoring software, it does not address allegations of racial bias at all.

This is not the first time Proctorio has been called out for failing to recognize various faces: issues that led to it being a student of color Quoted by a university As a reason it will not renew its contract with the company. Even Senator Richard Blumental (D-CT) Called out of company When talking about bias in proctoring software.

while Racial bias is not new in the code, It is particularly troubling to impress students who are only trying to do their school work, especially in a year where distance education is the only option for some.