Remote proctoring
Monitoring a candidate during a remote assessment, typically through webcam, screen recording, room scans or gaze tracking, to detect cheating.
Last reviewed
In practice
Its weakness is structural. Watching a candidate’s face does not reveal a second device, which is where most modern assistance comes from, while it does generate flags for anyone whose home is shared, small or noisy.
Research and legal challenges have repeatedly raised differential false-positive rates, including worse face detection for candidates with darker skin, and disproportionate flagging of disabled candidates whose assistive technology looks anomalous to a naive detector.
The alternative is to examine the work rather than the room: content-authenticity signals, clarifying questions that require understanding rather than possession of an answer, and items generated per candidate so there is no shared answer key to circulate.
Not to be confused with
- Integrity signals
- Proctoring observes the candidate. Integrity signals observe the submission. The second scales better, discriminates less, and produces evidence a reviewer can actually examine.
Related
Work-sample test
A selection method in which a candidate completes a bounded, realistic task drawn from the job, and the output is scored against predefined criteria.
Predictive validity
The extent to which performance on a selection method actually predicts performance on the job, expressed as a correlation.
How CalHire handles this: Assessment integrity without surveillance
Read further
Longer pieces on this and the arguments around it.
Why webcam proctoring is the wrong fix for assessment integrity
Webcam proctoring flags disabled candidates, people with darker skin and anyone without a private room. What it costs, and what to measure instead.
ReadCandidates are using AI in your assessments. Now what?
AI-text detectors are unreliable and disproportionately flag non-native speakers. What to do instead: assessment design, behavioural signals, and human review.
Read