The extremely shady “educational integrity” industry

From Proctorio to Honorlock.

The pandemic presented an opportunity to reconsider our seemingly immutable assumptions about life — for adults, anyway. We got the Great Resignation and “hybrid” work-from-home. Our kids got remote learning. Ugh.

Don’t get me wrong: remote learning has its advantages, especially for kids coping with physical and mental health issues, kids with passionate out-of-school interests and kids escaping a discriminatory and bullying environment (this isn’t as good as addressing discrimination and bullying, but…).

But the remote learning boom has emboldened the absolute worst in the ed-tech sector. It’s not just that these companies are price-gouging our schools and normalizing surveillance for kids — they’re reinforcing everything terrible about educational assessment, and (incredibly), making it even worse.

High-stakes test-taking is widely understood to have little pedagogical value. To the extent that it measures learning, it only does so for one chunk of learners, and all too often, it’s just measuring test-taking ability. In other words, scoring high on a high-stakes test can mean that you’re good at tests, or that you understand the material. Scoring low can mean that you’re bad at tests, or that you don’t understand the material…