  The onset of the COVID-19 pandemic changed the landscape of education and led
to increased usage of remote proctoring tools that are designed to monitor
students when they take assessments outside the classroom. While prior work has
explored students' privacy and security concerns regarding online proctoring
tools, the perspective of educators is under explored. Notably, educators are
the decision makers in the classrooms and choose which remote proctoring
services and the level of observations they deem appropriate. To explore how
educators balance the security and privacy of their students with the
requirements of remote exams, we sent survey requests to over 3,400 instructors
at a large private university that taught online classes during the 2020/21
academic year. We had n=125 responses: 21% of the educators surveyed used
online exam proctoring services during the remote learning period, and of
those, 35% plan to continue using the tools even when there is a full return to
in-person learning. Educators who use exam proctoring services are often
comfortable with their monitoring capabilities. However, educators are
concerned about students sharing certain types of information with exam
proctoring companies, particularly when proctoring services collect
identifiable information to validate students' identities. Our results suggest
that many educators developed alternative assessments that did not require
online proctoring and that those who did use online proctoring services often
considered the tradeoffs between the potential risks to student privacy and the
utility or necessity of exam proctoring services.
