I read an Interesting article in Honi Soit, the student newspaper of the University of Sydney, about that school’s use of ProctorU. It reports that in 2021, ProctorU made 30,000 reports of possible misconduct. When investigated by the school, just 364 were found to be instances of academic dishonesty. The next year 66,000 reports were filed with 750 referred to the Registrar as *potential* instances of academic misconduct (the number of *actual* misconduct cases for the year was not released).
The article notes:
“There are a number of problems with this. The first is the huge volume of ProctorU reports made to the University. The process of working through tens of thousands of automated reports, followed by thousands of cases referred to faculties, then hundreds of finalised reports to the Registrar, entails a substantial diversion of University resources. The University is now increasing the amount of staff involved in processing cases in 2023.”
And:
“It is clear that ProctorU’s unreliable trigger-happiness affects students too. Hundreds of students are put through a process in which the actual rate of findings against them is low, even for those referred to the Registrar. This causes significant stress, given the potential consequences of such findings against students.”
The university is winding down its use of ProctorU.
This proctoring company is also used for the TOEFL and GRE tests. This article suggests answers to the questions I’ve had over the past couple of years. Perhaps the Office of Testing Integrity at ETS is also getting a huge volume of reports to sift through. That could explain some of the long wait times to get results and even some of the score cancellations that leave test-takers puzzled.