“It's been Lovely Watching you”: Institutional Decision-Making on Online Proctoring Software

Universities have adopted remote proctoring software to maintain academic integrity during invigilated online exams. The use of this software, however, has raised privacy, security, and ethical concerns, including surveillance of students' bedrooms, processing of student data, and racially biased monitoring. Additionally, this software can require substantial local computer permissions. Prior work has explored student and educator perceptions and use of this software, but there remains a gap in understanding how senior administrators decide to adopt (or not adopt) these tools at an institutional level. This paper presents the results of interviews with 20 university administrators from the U.S. and Australia towards understanding how and why their universities decided to centrally adopt (or not adopt) remote proctoring software. We find that academic governance processes included senior administrators, legal, and IT teams, even during the rush at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, but that students were sometimes structurally excluded from the process of adoption. We explore how administrators weighed the need for academic integrity against competing concerns about privacy, security, ethics, and long-term operational issues like cost. We find that universities adopted remote proctoring despite concerns about privacy and security, sometimes attempting to mitigate these concerns. As academia continues to explore hybrid learning, our research can guide institutions in the adoption of Educational Technologies and the assessment of student learning.