Remote proctoring had a rough few years, and the criticisms are mostly fair: false flags from ordinary fidgeting, worse performance on darker skin in some systems, students told to pan a webcam around their bedroom, and a general sense that the institution has decided the student is a suspect.
The defence is that it addresses a real problem. It does. During a timed exam, someone might have a second device open. Locking the browser and watching the room is a direct answer to that.
The trouble is what it costs and what it leaves untouched.
What proctoring can and cannot cover
It covers the exam window. It does not cover the coursework, the essay, the lab report, the problem set, or the project: the majority of assessed work in most degrees, all of it produced unsupervised, none of it proctorable without turning a degree into a surveillance programme.
A tool that secures two hours out of a semester is not securing the semester.
The other trade
Verification does not care where the work was produced or who was in the room. It asks the student to account for the finished thing afterwards. If they can explain the method, defend the choices, and handle a follow-up on a specific paragraph, the origin question mostly answers itself.
This has three practical advantages over watching.
- It applies to any work, produced anywhere, including everything a proctor never sees.
- It produces something a panel can review later, rather than a flag from a movement detector.
- It does not require a student to show a stranger their bedroom, which is not a small thing and is increasingly a legal question in several jurisdictions.
And one honest disadvantage: it takes the student's time, a few minutes per assessed submission, whereas proctoring is passive from the institution's side.
Where each belongs
We are not arguing that proctoring should disappear. For a high-stakes timed exam where the construct genuinely requires closed-book conditions, invigilation of some kind is the right tool and everyone understands why.
For the other ninety percent of assessed work, watching was never available and is not becoming available. The question there was always going to be what a student can account for, and it is worth building the assessment around that rather than around the assumption that supervision is the only form of trust.