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May 10, 2021 07:42 am

Anti-Cheating Technology Challenged at Dartmouth Medical School

Dartmouth college switched to remote tests when the coronavirus ended in-person exams — then accused 17 medical students of cheating, reports the New York Times:At the heart of the accusations is Dartmouth's use of the Canvas system to retroactively track student activity during remote exams without their knowledge. In the process, the medical school may have overstepped by using certain online activity data to try to pinpoint cheating, leading to some erroneous accusations, according to independent technology experts, a review of the software code and school documents obtained by The New York Times. Dartmouth's drive to root out cheating provides a sobering case study of how the coronavirus has accelerated colleges' reliance on technology, normalizing student tracking in ways that are likely to endure after the pandemic. While universities have long used anti-plagiarism software and other anti-cheating apps, the pandemic has pushed hundreds of schools that switched to remote learning to embrace more invasive tools. Over the last year, many have required students to download software that can take over their computers during remote exams or use webcams to monitor their eye movements for possibly suspicious activity, even as technology experts have warned that such tools can be invasive, insecure, unfair and inaccurate. Some universities are now facing a backlash over the technology.... While some students may have cheated, technology experts said, it would be difficult for a disciplinary committee to distinguish cheating from noncheating based on the data snapshots that Dartmouth provided to accused students. And in an analysis of the Canvas software code, the Times found instances in which the system automatically generated activity data even when no one was using a device. "If other schools follow the precedent that Dartmouth is setting here, any student can be accused based on the flimsiest technical evidence," said Cooper Quintin, senior staff technologist at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a digital rights organization, who analyzed Dartmouth's methodology. Seven of the 17 accused students have had their cases dismissed. In at least one of those cases, administrators said, "automated Canvas processes are likely to have created the data that was seen rather than deliberate activity by the user," according to a school email that students made public. The 10 others have been expelled, suspended or received course failures and unprofessional-conduct marks on their records that could curtail their medical careers... Tensions flared in early April when an anonymous student account on Instagram posted about the cheating charges. Soon after, Dartmouth issued a social media policy warning that students' anonymous posts "may still be traced back" to them.... The conduct review committee then issued decisions in 10 of the cases, telling several students that they would be expelled, suspending others and requiring some to retake courses or repeat a year of school at a cost of nearly $70,000... Several students said they were now so afraid of being unfairly targeted in a data-mining dragnet that they had pushed the medical school to offer in-person exams with human proctors. Others said they had advised prospective medical students against coming to Dartmouth.

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