Who Will Watch the Watchmen? The Ethico-political Arrangements of Algorithmic Proctoring for Academic Integrity

Critics of artificial intelligence have suggested that the principles of fairness, accountability and transparency (FATE) have been used for ‘ethics washing’, in order to appease industrial interests. In this article, we develop this relational and context-dependent analysis, arguing that ethics should not be understood as abstract values or design decisions, but as socio-technical achievements, enacted in the practices of students, teachers and corporations. We propose that the ethics of using AI in education are political, involving the distribution of power, privilege and resources. To illustrate this, we trace the controversies that followed from an incident in which a student was misclassified as a cheat by an online proctoring platform during the Covid-19 lockdown, analysing this incident to reveal the socio-technical arrangements of academic integrity. We then show how Joan Tronto’s work on the ethics of care can help think about the politics of these socio-technical arrangements — that is, about historically constituted power relations and the delegation of responsibilities within these institutions. The paper concludes by setting the immediate need for restorative justice against the slower temporality of systemic failure, and inviting speculation that could create new relationships between universities, students, businesses, algorithms and the idea of academic integrity.