Colleges and universities are increasingly using artificial intelligence (AI) tools for a wide range of functions. Those uses include AI exam proctoring technology, tracking your eye movement and demeanor through video surveillance in the exam room or from your computer screen camera. Yet AI gaze tracking can raise false flags and suspicions, suggesting that you are cheating on the exam when your actions are entirely innocent. Don't let false AI gaze tracking cheating alerts and their resulting disciplinary charges derail your college or university education. Retain the Lento Law Firm's premier Student Defense Team to defend your school disciplinary charges. Call 888.535.3686 or use our contact form now to retain us for your case and get the skilled advocacy and technical assistance you need to overcome false flag AI gaze tracking alerts.
College and University Use of AI Technology
Colleges and universities have increased their use of AI technologies across a spectrum of functions, well beyond exam proctoring. Schools use AI video surveillance cameras across their campuses, both outdoors and indoors, to monitor student movements for suspicious, endangering, disruptive, and illegal activities. Colleges and universities deploy AI monitors across their digital communications, course and learning management, and other computer systems, to alert to suspicious activities and threatening or harmful communications. Schools' registrars and administrators deploy AI tools for a wide range of administrative functions, from admissions to finances, personnel, facilities management, and marketing. And professors and instructors deploy AI tools for presentation design, problem design, and assessment and grading, among other academic tasks and functions. You are in a very highly surveilled and managed environment when on your college or university campus or engaged in a school activity online.
AI Exam Proctoring
Exam proctoring is another function of colleges and universities where schools deploy AI surveillance and monitoring tools. Indeed, exam proctoring is a perfect function for AI use, in that it generally requires only lower-skill personnel to manage highly routine functions. If your school does not require your professors to proctor their own exams, then it may employ retired school teachers or part-time or temporary administrative assistants to sit in the exam rooms or peer into computer screens for online proctoring of exams. But technology vendors have been offering schools exam-monitoring and proctoring software for some time, starting with keystroke monitoring and computer access of other programs and internet sites, and progressing to movement, demeanor, and eye-gaze tracking through computer screens or in-room cameras. AI proctoring on campus has unquestionably arrived. The bigger question we address here is how our attorneys help you navigate related disciplinary charges.
Exam Eye Movements and Demeanor
To address your AI exam proctoring disciplinary charges, you need to understand what AI demeanor and gaze tracking tools attempt to accomplish when monitoring students taking exams. College and university exams require specific attention and concentration from students. You certainly know the routine. You read the exam materials with patterned eye movements and a certain expression reflecting concentration and consistent attention. You likewise deploy the keyboard and craft your exam responses using eye movements from keyboard, calculator, or other devices and material to the screen and back, as you enter your exam responses. You may briefly relax your attention and divert your eyes from the computer screen, keyboard, or adjacent materials, but not in a concentrated manner, such as to read unauthorized notes or another examinee's screen, or to pick up signals from another examinee or adjacent person or device. You also don't reflect overly agitated, nervous, angry, emotional, or sudden movements, accompanied by furtive eye movement, or you might disrupt other examinees.
AI Gaze Tracking
AI gaze tracking proctoring applications attempt to track all of the above eye movements and demeanor changes. If, as is obviously true, your computer, tablet, and cell phone can distinguish your facial features from the facial features of every other person in the world, for security purposes, your devices and the software apps they deploy can also distinguish your basic eye movements. You may already be well aware that social media apps deploy gaze trackers to guide algorithms on what content and advertising to show you, based on the images and text at which you glance, and on what captures your brief attention and holds your attention the longest. AI exam proctoring tools can use gaze tracking for their own exam security purposes. Using AI proctoring tools, your school officials can know when you look left, right, up, and down, for how briefly or how long, and with what level of concentration and attention.
Common AI exam proctoring eye gaze tracking tools include ExamSoft's ExamMonitor app, Kriterion's AI proctor assistance tool, arXiv's AI-assisted gaze detection proctoring tool, the Invigilator app, SmarterServices' automated proctoring tool, and Talview's automated proctoring tool. These are just a few of the AI-assisted eye gaze tracking systems colleges and universities use for exam proctoring. The tools are widely available for reasonable subscription prices or even free when bundled with other technology services that colleges and universities commonly acquire and deploy. Indeed, AI gaze trackers for exam proctoring are in such widespread use that technology vendors are marketing AI technology tools to defeat AI gaze trackers during college and university exams.
AI Exam Proctoring Alerts
AI proctoring tools then analyze your eye movements and demeanor against design protocols for appropriate exam effort. AI designers know what to train their proctoring tools to look for in terms of student attention and concentration during exams. AI tools basically look for the same things human proctors would look for, except that AI tools have vastly greater capability to monitor all students at once, in a continuous and consistent manner. While human proctors look left and right, and sometimes read books or take brief siestas, creating opportunities for nefarious students to cheat, AI gaze trackers don't take any such breaks. When the AI tracker detects concentrated eye gazing down, left, or right, inappropriate eye movements away from the screen toward other stimuli and sources before back to the screen, closed eyes for long periods, and other anomalies, the AI trackers send the central exam administrator an alert with the time- and date-stamped surveillance video as evidence.
False Alert Issues with AI Gaze Tracking
To that point, all may be well and good. However, some students, indeed many students, exhibit anomalous exam behavior for a wide range of reasons beyond attempts to cheat. Some students, for instance, have curious facial tics or eye scrunches associated with mild anxiety or stress, like a college or university exam might produce. Other students have mental conditions like autism, psychiatric conditions like depression, or neurological conditions like Tourette's syndrome, affecting their eye movement and demeanor, especially under stress. Even without specific tics, habits, disabilities, or other diagnosable conditions, students also exhibit a range of eye movements and related behaviors at different times, due to various thoughts and stimuli. During an exam, you might just suddenly think of something sad, depressing, frightening, or funny, stimulated by the exam content or conditions or your own meandering thoughts, producing eye movements the AI gaze tracker alerts as suspicious, when you have done nothing whatsoever wrong.
Misuse of AI Gaze Tracking in Discipline
Again, so far, all may be well and good, even if your school's AI gaze tracking exam proctoring tool issues a false alert or multiple false alerts involving your exam effort. Presumably, a sound, well-trained, and reliable exam security official or similar disciplinary official receiving the alert, AI report, and AI surveillance video would sort proper alerts regarding authentically suspicious activity from false alerts. But that's not consistently the way in which college and university officials work with AI systems and alerts. AI systems have the negative effect of producing over-reliance on their analyses and reports.
College and university officials generally have multiple duties. They must prioritize their duties carefully to get their work done. Processing AI-generated exam proctoring alerts can be one of those duties that gets short shrift, meaning less attention than due. After all, if an expensive and sophisticated AI gaze tracker tool, sold to the school with the vendor's exaggerated assurances of the tool's value and accuracy, says a student cheated, then the student must have cheated, right? Exam administrators and disciplinary officials relying entirely or too much on AI alerts can be a serious problem for the involved student. Your academic misconduct charges may be due entirely or largely to precisely this problem. Your school may have taken the AI report of your suspected cheating as an established fact in the discipline process, when AI alerts are instead only alerts, more like an allegation than a finding.
Defense of AI Gaze Tracking Misconduct Charges
Our attorneys have the substantial skill and experience to defend and defeat false flag AI gaze tracking exam cheating charges. We may be able to show your school's disciplinary officials that your eye movements were due to a well-known and diagnosed condition reflected in your medical history, a peculiar habit you commonly exhibit as confirmed by your family and friends, or an extenuating circumstance relating to the specific exam administration. You may, for instance, have been ill, injured, or upset by some matter, the documentation of which may convince your school to drop the investigation and disciplinary charges. Let us help you identify, document, present, and prove your available defenses to AI gaze tracking misconduct charges.
Invoking School Disciplinary Procedures
At this point, when you need to challenge a false AI alert generated by eye gaze tracking during an exam, our attorneys can invoke your school's disciplinary procedures to present your exonerating evidence and any available case in mitigation of proposed sanctions. Your school will have protective investigation, hearing, and appeal procedures in place, like the University of Oregon's Standard Operating Procedures for Academic Misconduct Allegations. Those procedures meet a school's constitutional, statutory, and contractual obligations to provide students with due process, including fair notice of the disciplinary charges and a fair hearing before an impartial decision maker.
Retain us the moment you receive notice of your disciplinary investigation relating to an AI eye tracking alert and suspected exam cheating. If you retain us before your school files formal disciplinary charges, we may be able to work with the school's assigned investigator to share your information, explanation, and documentation in truthful, accurate, consistent, and complete form, relieving the investigator of suspicions. We may be able to head off formal charges. If you already face charges, we may be able to arrange an early conciliation conference at which to present your explanation, including proposals for remedial measures in lieu of punitive sanctions if the school has substantial evidence that you committed an academic violation. We may be able to gain your school's early voluntary dismissal of the charges.
Academic Misconduct Hearing Procedures
If instead your AI gaze tracking charges proceed to hearing, then we can present your testimony, the testimony of other defense witnesses, and the opinions of our forensic consultants regarding the use and misuse of AI gaze tracking technology. We can also cross-examine adverse witnesses and challenge other incriminating evidence. If you have already lost your hearing, we can take your school appeals. We may alternatively be able to negotiate special relief through your school's general counsel or obtain civil court relief.
Premier Student Defense Attorneys Available
If you face college or university academic misconduct disciplinary charges arising out of your school's misuse of AI gaze tracking technology for online exams or similar purposes, retain the Lento Law Firm's premier Student Defense Team for your strategic and effective defense. Our attorneys have helped hundreds of students nationwide successfully defend academic misconduct charges and other disciplinary charges. We are available wherever you are located and for whatever field or program you study. Call 888.535.3686 or use our contact form now to retain us for your case.
