It’s hard to see it in any other light. You could always have online exams happen in front of an online board— take the human interaction we’ve always used and just move it online.

Proctorio reflects the cost cutting, hyper systemization of education, which is a trend that— every time I see it— seems to be antithetical to actual education.

In a room, I can make sure that there is no other person there, that there is no big monitor with solutions, notes, whatever. I can also not see whether the students has another browser open with one of the cheat-websites where one of his faster colleagues has already uploaded the solution. I'm luckily in a field where we can do open-book exams without too much problems, which makes the "hidden notes" a non-issue, but one wants to be sure that it's actually the student who solves the problem. That is much easier in a class room.

If someone can use hidden notes or google to get the answers then the exam isn't testing for knowledge or subject-matter understanding.

While it doesn't test for understanding, it absolutely tests for knowledge. Take the medical profession. There are many easily googlable facts a student has to know without google. For example a list of symptoms for a diagnosis (or better: possible diagnoses for a list of symptoms). It's not the only thing, but it's part of the education.

Or in physics (my field), I do want a student to know U=RI. Not google it. Not look it up. I also want them to be able to transform it to U/R=I.

Not the parent, but I say that this is evidence of a poor system because authenticity of learning is obvious to a good professor. My best professors would always have a feeling of what ideas or strategies I would employ to solve their problems - if someone else did my project or wrote my paper it would be completely obvious.

Any of these anti-cheating systems are trying to cut costs by enabling weaker teacher-student interactions.

Higher education is already quite expensive. It would be great to have highly qualified professors spend more time directly interacting with students, but who will pay for those extra professors?

Why is higher education so expensive, anyway? It's already more expensive to go to college than it would be to just hire a set of PhD holders as private tutors for most fields

What a scam

Higher education is so expensive primarily because of the widespread availability of government subsidized student loans. Those have removed most of the pressure on prices. If we eliminated those loans then tuition would fall drastically, but that would also reduce educational opportunities for low income students.

In the past, we solved this problem by not having online proctoring, we had exams in front of a board. Maybe if the necessity of such demonstrations is paramount, doing them online is not the correct answer.

I guess this is a consequence of the Covid pandemic, where such a thing is not allowed at the moment.

The software - problematic as it is - is older than the pandemic. Also, maybe if you cannot reliably proctor exams, the solution should not be to use a highly-invasive, potentially problem-causing software, but to cancel the exams and the academic year until the pandemic is over. After all, if you cannot give exams, students also were not able to take part in studies to the same extend as before (e.g. library and/or lab access would probably be limited)

The software is indeed older than Covid, but its common usage by widely respected schools is not.

So your preferred solution would be to just stop all education for the duration of the pandemic? Although online education sucks, I'm not sure if most students would agree with you.

In all fairness, as we agree that the education experience (and the education?) does not come up to the pre-covid standard, I can see employers discriminating against students who graduated under these circumstances. Students should have an incentive of that not happening, and thus welcome a gap year.