Surveillance and Disability in Online Proctored Exams: Student Perspectives and Design Implications

TL;DR

This paper explores disabled students' experiences with online proctoring systems, highlighting privacy concerns, unfair treatment, and design challenges, and offers implications for creating more inclusive surveillance technologies.

Contribution

It provides a qualitative analysis of disabled students' perspectives on OPS, revealing specific issues and proposing design considerations to improve accessibility and privacy.

Findings

Disabled students experience increased anxiety and cognitive load due to surveillance.

Current OPS often unfairly flag students with disabilities.

Students must compromise privacy and accommodations to participate in remote exams.

Abstract

Online proctoring systems (OPS) are technologies and services that are used to monitor students during an online exam to deter cheating. However, OPS often violates student privacy by implementing overly intrusive surveillance to which students cannot consent meaningfully. The technologies used in OPS have been shown to unfairly flag students with disabilities. Our reflexive thematic analysis of interviews with students who have first-hand experience with online invigilated exams and who have disability accommodations points to their anxiety about the interaction between surveillance and their disabilities, leading to fears about misrepresentation and increased cognitive load on the exam. Students describe the compromises they need to make with their privacy and accommodations to take remote tests and share their privacy values. We present the implications for the design of OPS to mitigate the issues faced by disabled students.