e doubted most students knew they were signing up for long-term monitoring when they clicked to connect to the campus WiFi.

The systems, he added, are isolating for students who don’t own smartphones,

He said he squandered several of his early lectures trying to convince the app he was present, toggling his settings in desperation as professors needled him to put the phone away. He then had to defend himself to campus staff members, who believed the data more than him.

We know where you live.’ These days, it’s, ‘We know where you are,’ ” Purdue University president Mitch Daniels wrote last year about his school’s location-tracking software. “Isn’t technology wonderful?”

In Sasha’s case, Benz said, the university sent an adviser to knock on her door

It also generates a “risk score” for students based around factors such as how much time they spent in community centers or at the gym.

“At every school, there are lots of Sashas,” he said. “And the bigger you are, the more Sashas that you have.”

A student avoiding the cafeteria might suffer from food insecurity or an eating disorder; a student skipping class might be grievously depressed. The data isn’t conclusive, Benz said, but it can “shine a light on where people can investigate, so students don’t slip through the cracks.”

using systems that calculate personalized “risk scores” based on factors such as whether the student is going to the library enough.

Graduates will be well prepared … to embrace 24/7 government tracking and social credit systems

— have also led some to worry whether anyone will truly know when all this surveillance has gone too far.

a trade-off of future worries for the immediacy of convenience, comfort and ease. If a tracking system can make students be better, one college adviser said, isn’t that a good thing?

The tracking systems, they worry, will infantilize students in the very place where they’re expected to grow into adults, further training them to see surveillance as a normal part of living, whether they like it or not.

Dozens of schools now use such technology to monitor students’ academic performance, analyze their conduct or assess their mental health.

They want those points,” he said. “They know I’m watching and acting on it. So, behaviorally, they change.

When Syracuse University freshmen walk into professor Jeff Rubin’s Introduction to Information Technologies class, seven small Bluetooth beacons hidden around the Grant Auditorium lecture hall connect with an app on their smartphones and boost their “attendance points.”

ProctorU chief executive officer Scott McFarland said that “students should be reassured that all testing data is owned by their schools, not the proctoring provider.”“Schools set the rules about what data is collected, how it’s retained and for how long,” he said in an emailed statement.

As the pandemic makes remote learning a long-term state of affairs for many schools, Mr. Swauger, in Denver, recommends that schools take some time to do their research and only roll out systems that are proven to work.

“No thank you,” she said. “I’d rather my students not feel like they’re in a police state.

Taking an exam in the comfort of your own home, on your own schedule, is less invasive

damage to the student-teacher relationship

damage to the student-teacher relationship

And algorithms designed to detect suspicious movement will inevitably flag disabled students and others who do not move in the way the platforms expect, he added.

disabled students

There’s a big gulf between what this technology promises, and what it actually does on the groun

Facial recognition systems – which some proctoring platforms use to confirm the identity of the test taker – are less accurate with dark-skinned people, 

bias in facial recognition but also because of the potential for data collection.

allows students to continue learning.“We believe that many lives have been positively impacted by being able to continue their education and careers

“There are so many systematic barriers preventing people like me from obtaining these degrees – and this is just another example of tha

Mr. Khan began to suspect that it was his dark skin

aw student Areeb Khan

We need a safe way to experiment with these technologies and understand the consequences of their use instead of just continuing a blind march towards surveillance for the purpose of profit-making,” Newman says. “These are sophisticated applications with lifelong consequences for the individuals who are analyzed by them, to ends as yet unknown. We all need to be really judicious and thoughtful here.”

There is no promise to the user that their data won’t leave a specific device,” says Shmatikov. “We still don’t really know just how much data voice-skill hosts like Amazon—or third parties that rely on Amazon—are harvesting, or what they’re doing with that information.” Amazon didn’t respond to multiple requests for comment.

What if data harvested from students’ conversations affected their chances of getting a mortgage or a job later on? What if it were used against foreign students to have them deported, possibly to home countries where they could be imprisoned for their political views?

“We use Amazon’s platform to make this work. Amazon stores information about usage that can be purged upon request.”

access to financials, course schedules and grades, and outstanding fees via voice devices.

“When it comes to deploying listening devices where sensitive conversations occur, we simply have no idea what long-term effect having conversations recorded and kept by Amazon might have on their futures—even, quite possibly, on their health and well-being,

Amazon to advance voice--enabled technology on campuses, part of the tech giant’s Alexa Innovation Fellowship

Administrators at some of these schools told me they believe Alexa will bolster enrollment and reduce dropout rates

Arizona State University, Lancaster University in the UK, and Ross University School of Medicine in Barbados have adopted voice-skill technology on campus. Some, including Northeastern University

Each device was pre-programmed with answers to about 130 SLU-specific questions, ranging from library hours to the location of the registrar’s office (the school dubbed this “AskSLU”). The devices also included the basic voice “skills” available on other Dots, including alarms and reminders, general information, and the ability to stream music.

When Mateo Catano returned for his second year as an undergraduate at Saint Louis University