ExamSoft monitoring software has face detection issue

Gabe Teninbaum, Professor at Suffolk University Law School, calls on ExamSoft to fix a serious bug with its testing software: the inability to recognize faces. It’s a problem that can delay applicants – or prevent them from fully starting their exams – and according to reports, it disproportionately affects people with dark skin.

ExamSoft software registers students while taking exams remotely and watches for signs of academic dishonesty. Teninbaum’s report discusses a feature of ExamSoft called ExamID, which aims to verify that candidates are who they claim to be. The first time a student logs into their exam portal, they upload a photo of themselves (their “reference image”); they are then invited to take another selfie before starting future exams, which the software checks against their original photo.

Research has found that facial recognition algorithms consistently make more mistakes in identifying black faces than white ones. And while these studies don’t specifically focus on ExamSoft, that doesn’t appear to be an exception. In September, several non-white candidates told the New York Times that the software could not identify them due to “bad lighting” – an issue that Teninbaum, who has fair skin, was unable to reproduce.

In early fall, Teninbaum set out to find a solution. He believes such mistakes add undue stress to an already stressful time. “These are students who are about to take a high stakes exam with a lot of stuff at stake, and that’s very unwelcome,” Teninbaum said in an interview with The edge.

“Whenever you take an exam, you just want to focus on the exam,” he added. “You don’t want to feel like you have those extra challenges.”

Teninbaum also thinks that optics are important; schools owe it to marginalized students not to rely on a category of software deemed to be discriminatory. “Students deserve to feel that their institution is doing what it can to protect their rights, interests and dignity,” he says.

In his report, which will appear in The Journal of Robotics, Artificial Intelligence and Law, Teninbaum describes the workaround he found.

He suggests that schools assign each student an identical generic reference image. Then, he suggests, they should ask ExamSoft to activate “deferred identification,” a feature built into the software that allows students to take exams even if identification fails. This feature is mostly hidden – it’s not mentioned anywhere on the ExamSoft website (at least, not that I can find). Only ExamSoft can activate it.

In tandem, these adjustments will cause ExamSoft to misidentify each candidate. But they will still be able to take their exams – ExamSoft will then send the selfies to the school and the trainers can manually check everyone. “We know who our students are,” Teninbaum says. “We can make sure the students are who they say they are and not subject them to these kinds of challenges.

He also suggests that ExamSoft make the “deferred identification” feature available to clients. “The reporter urges ExamSoft to incorporate this into a feature whereby institutions can simply toggle on / off, thereby bypassing ExamID until the technology becomes non-discriminatory technology,” its report read. .

Teninbaum hopes these changes will last beyond the COVID-19 pandemic and may help students feel more comfortable taking distance education. “This is going to be a growing problem as more and more people go online for their education,” he says.

Even so, it only solved part of the problem. Students experienced a range of hiccups with ExamSoft’s monitoring software. More than 3,000 people who used the platform to take the California bar exam in October had their videos flagged for potential rule violations – nearly 36% of candidates who took the exam online. Users reported audio issues and other technical issues.

A group of six U.S. Senators – including Richard Blumenthal, Elizabeth Warren and Corey Booker – wrote an open letter to ExamSoft in December, highlighting the potential harms for students of color and students with disabilities, among many other concerns.

ExamSoft did not immediately respond to a request for comment.