University proctor's scan of student's bedroom before online exam violates Fourth Amendment

Nicholas Todd's Bedroom Workspace (Nicholas Todd CC BY 2.0)

In a case with implications for remote testing in all public universities, Cleveland State University violated a student's constitutional rights by requiring a visual scan of his bedroom before he took an online exam, a federal court ruled Monday.

Plaintiff-student Aaron Ogletree complained about the visual scan of his bedroom before a remote exam in General Chemistry II in spring 2021.  The court described the process of the Cleveland State testing service: 

First, at the outset of a proctored online exam, whether proctored through an electronic application or an actual person, students must “show their ID next to their face so you can clearly see and read the ID and be able to tell that that person is the same person that is on the ID.” Second, either the proctoring application or the proctor prompts the student to conduct a room scan of his environment. Other students taking the remote test can see the room scans of other students.

Live exams were not permitted at the time because of the pandemic. Ogletree, who lived with his mother and two siblings, said "that he 'currently [had] confidential settlement documents in the form of late arriving 1099s scattered about [his] work area and there [was] not enough time to secure them,'" the court reported. "The proctor testified that she did not see any tax documents or medications."  A recording of the exam including the room scan was retained by a Cleveland State contractor.

Cleveland State sought to exempt the case from Fourth Amendment purview by analogizing to home visits by benefit administrators. The court rejected the analogy:

[T]he Sixth Circuit[] ... accurately reads this line of cases as applying to a fairly distinct set of circumstances materially different than those at issue here: making welfare benefits contingent, for all recipients, on a limited and consensual search to confirm expenditure of the funds for the interest of a child. In contrast, ... this case involves the privilege of college admission and attendance and does not involve a benefit made available to all citizens as of right. Additionally, the record here shows a variable policy—enforced, unevenly, in the discretion of a combination of proctors and professors—of using remote scans that make a student’s home visible, including to other students, with uncertain consequences.

In the Fourth Amendment reasonableness analysis, Cleveland State pointed to Supreme Court precedents that have been generous to K12 public school officials in searching and drug testing students and their possessions. The court agreed with the plaintiff that an adult attaining a higher education by choice is a different matter from the custodial relationship of a school to a minor child.

The room scan moreover was an ill fit with the aim of exam security. Students were able to access their cell phones and to leave the camera view during exams. And the school could have required papers instead of exam, the court suggested.

Cleveland State is hardly the only university to use room scans. Room scans have been touted as a way of ensuring the security of remote exams. Proctoring contractors might use the technique without a university realizing it. And like other remote services precipitated by the pandemic, remote exams might persist for sake of convenience.

Bar exam authorities typically are public entities, too, subject to the Fourth Amendment. The LSAC that administers the law school admission test (LSAT) is a nonprofit corporation, not a public entity, though there might be Fourth Amendment implications if a public law school requires the LSAT for admission. Either way, it's a bad look for an education gatekeeper to violate privacy.

The LSAC partly averts the privacy problem by requiring test takers to clear their environment of distracting or potentially compromising items. Proctors visually inspect only the test taker's workspace. Despite, or even with, such more limited protocols, law exam administrations in the US and UK have generated ugly headlines about students unable to urinate in privacy. Suffice to say, remote testing security is a work in progress.

The case is Ogletree v. Cleveland State University (N.D. Ohio Aug. 22, 2022), the Honorable J. Philip Calabrese presiding. HT @ Monica Chin for The Verge.