By Ingrid Howard
After hearing about the recent Varsity Blues Sting – the college admissions scandal that involved celebrities such as Lori Loughlin and Felicity Huffman – people might have thought that was just rich people doing rich people things.
But Jarrod Morgan, founder of Proctor U, said manipulating the education system isn’t just for the rich, and it’s a problem that isn’t going away any time soon. It also isn’t just about bribes.
“As long as there have been people learning information, there have been a group of people trying to pretend they’ve learned information,” he said.
Proctor U is a web service based in Hoover that proctors online exams and gives test takers the opportunity to take a test anywhere, anytime. Morgan said his company serves colleges and organizations around the globe and has been around for 11 years. The company’s chief technology officer, Matthew Jaeh, recently won the Alabama CIO of the Year Orbie Award.
When a person uses Proctor U, the proctor can see both the test taker’s computer screen and face via webcam. Additionally, the test taker must pan the webcam around the room.
But still, Morgan said an average 80% of the test takers have to be stopped before the exam begins to remove something from the testing area, such as a cell phone. Proctors will stop 7% of test takers once during the test for engaging in suspicious behavior, 2% of test takers will be stopped twice during a test, and 1% of the test takers keep pushing the limits and have to be reported for cheating.
A few years back, a proctor caught a student cheating who wanted to sit on the floor. But when his eyes kept looking at the same spot on the floor, the system’s artificial intelligence alerted the proctor that the student’s eye movements were suspicious.
As it turns out, the student had notes tucked under his rug, and the proctor caught him cheating. Now, test takers aren’t allowed to sit on the floor.
Other strange cases have included people fly- ing a drone in the room in an attempt to photograph test questions and putting sticky notes on their dog. Now there also are no drones and no pets policies for test takers.
“We catch people all the time,” Morgan said. “The reality of the situation is – with Proctor U or traditional testing – nothing is cheat-proof.
“A well-working testing program is one that admits that you’re going to have vulnerabilities that are going to pop up from things you had not even thought of. You have to have a process by which you find those things, identify them, study them and then change your process.”
Not All the Holes Are Plugged
Morgan said it also is time to question whether the SAT and ACT testing systems have all of the holes plugged. Some of those involved in the Varsity Blues Sting exploited the system’s vulnerabilities by claiming they had a learning disability, rescheduling the test and then using one of their own proctors, who manipulated test answers.
“They use the learning disability to get them out of their process, then they start bullying them into saying we’re going to do it this way,” Morgan said. “Even when you’re making a testing accommodation, you have to make sure you still have security in the process because people will cheat.”
Morgan said the holes in the system have been there for decades.
“It’s going to take a village for these things to change and to get people to open up to new techniques, and it’s not easy,” he said.
When Morgan started Proctor U, he said, it was his goal to make the system as good as an in-person proctor. Now, he said his system might be better.
“With all of the technology and processing and data that we’ve collected over the years, I think we can confidently say, in a lot of ways, we are more secure than traditional testing,” he said. “I think we know more about it.”
But because not many schools have hundreds of computers that students can all use at once, it will be hard to digitize the SAT or ACT and make it available through Proctor U. Instead, Morgan urges parents to use the Varsity Blues Sting as a teaching moment for their children.
“I actually took my daughters, as young as they are, and sat them down and explained to them what happened, and what happened to the people who did this when they were caught, and how their lives were messed up, and all of the bad things that could happen to them simply because they were dishonest,” he said.
“I actually took my daughters, as young as they are, and sat them down and explained to them what happened, and what happened to the people who did this when they were caught, and how their lives were messed up, and all of the bad things that could happen to them simply because they were dishonest,” he said.