The pandemic showed remote proctoring to be worse than useless

Kill it with fire.

Before covid, “remote proctoring” tools were a niche product, invasive tools that spied on students who needed to take high-stakes tests but couldn’t get to campus or a satellite test-taking room. But the lockdown meant that all students found themselves in this position.

This could have prompted educators to reconsider the use of high-stakes tests. After all, high-stakes testing has well-understood limitations in pedagogy, and organizes education around a highly artificial ritual completely unlike the rest of scholarly and industrial life.

It’s not like anyone does a job where you are prohibited from consulting reference texts or collaborating with your colleagues (if you have an colleague who does this, you should probably ask to be transferred to another team).

While in the academy, neither scholars nor researchers work without collaboration or access to references. It’s not clear what, exactly, a high-stakes test measures, apart from your ability to engage in the useless, non-transferrable skill of sitting a high-stakes test.

But rather than rethinking assessment, educational institutions doubled down on remote proctoring, throwing stupendous sums at companies that made outrageous promises about their…