Technology-driven proctoring: Validity, social justice and ethics in higher education

The COVID-19 pandemic has led to rapid change, unprecedented in higher education. One such change has been the almost complete shift to online assessment. The simultaneous employment of online assessment and proctoring has not enjoyed the rigorous academic debate and research traditionally associated with such shifts in academia. This engagement is essential and this article aims to discuss aspects of social justice, ethics and the validity of digital proctoring to the burgeoning debate. Digital proctoring is a lucrative industry (Coghlan Miller & Paterson, 2021), notwithstanding the admitted opportunities for cheating, irrespective of the intensity of overwatch. Digital proctoring is marketed and has become entangled with issues of institutional reputation and the legitimacy of qualifications. The student seems to be a secondary consideration compared to the technocratic digital proctoring arena. However, the introduction of online assessment, specifically with digital proctoring, impacts the assessment's validity by introducing intervening variables into the process. The drive to detect and prevent online cheating has led to algorithmic proliferation. This technologically driven approach has embedded social injustice and questionable ethics and validity into the assessment systems. This article examines the social justice, ethical and validity issues around technological proctoring under the grouped themes: Emotional factors;Racial and/or skin colour;Digital literacy and Technology;and Disability. However, the COVID-19 pandemicdriven shifts have provided the unprecedented opportunity to elevate assessment from recall to critical thinking and applicationbased assessment. An opportunity to ensure that our assessment is valid, assesses higher-order learning, and truly evaluates the concepts we wish to assess.

National qualifications in Scotland: A lightning rod for public concern about equity during the pandemic

Scotland, traditionally, has high levels of confidence in teachers. Fairness and justice are key concepts in policy and practice in Scottish education. For more than 100 years, the high‐stakes assessment system in Scotland, with the Scottish Higher qualification at its heart, has been crucial to that sense of opportunity and justice. However, in 2019–2020, public confidence in high‐stakes assessment in Scotland, as in other United Kingdom countries, was dented. In Scotland, the Covid‐19 pandemic meant that schools were closed, teachers provided online learning opportunities for pupils working at home and, for the first time in 130 years, it was not possible to run national examinations. To ensure that learners were not further disadvantaged, alternative approaches to gathering evidence for qualifications were instigated. However, these results were challenged as socially unjust and the results that had been nationally moderated were replaced by results based on locally moderated teachers' professional judgement. As Scotland looks to qualifications beyond Covid‐19, trust must be re‐built. This article reports on a participative research project that sought to understand public perceptions of standards and fairness across a range of key communities following this experience. Drawing on both qualitative and quantitative data, we analyse factors which affected trust in National Qualifications under the pandemic. The evidence suggests that when considering what matters for qualifications to be trusted, technocratic solutions are likely to be rejected by stakeholders. Understanding and responding to what led to the mistrust of qualifications in Scotland will be crucial to inform its future qualifications system.

Desires of technocracy in pandemic times: A multilevel study

Objectives: We aimed to predict the favor for a technocratic government in the context of the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic. Method: We tested a multilevel mediated moderated model on the ResPOnsE COVID-19 data set (rolling cross-section design, quota sample of the Italian adult population, N = 8210, data collected from March 17 to June 16, 2021). Results: Subjective vulnerability to COVID-19 showed a positive relationship with trust in science and scientists, which, in turn, had a positive relationship with favor for a technocratic government, particularly among participants who had low trust in the Italian Parliament. The prevalence of COVID-19 (measured at Level-2, with data nested by day of data collection) also showed a positive association with favor for a technocratic government. Conclusion: The COVID-19 pandemic may have jeopardized representative democracy: The objective and subjective threats it triggered favor trust in science and scientists that, when combined with a low level of trust toward political institutions, fosters the desire for a technocratic government. © 2023 The Authors. Social Science Quarterly published by Wiley Periodicals LLC on behalf of Southwestern Social Science Association.

School food at home: Brazil's national school food programme (PNAE) during the COVID-19 pandemic

School closures during the COVID-19 pandemic have hindered students' food access, particularly low-income students who rely on schools for their primary daily meals. School food programmes have adapted to pandemic conditions by providing school food at home (SF@H). We conceptually explore the changing geographies of school food during the pandemic by examining adaptations by Brazil's national school food programme (PNAE) and then comparing it to regular school food provision. Our research is informed by 43 interviews with public officials and civil society representatives from all regions of Brazil, ranging from high-level technocrats to frontline responders engaged with school food. Rapid response through national school food policy allowed schools to provide food at home as a pandemic relief effort by creating novel alternative food geographies that keep schools at the heart of agri-food systems. SF@H provide local family farmers with an alternative commercialisation channel to those compromised because of social distancing measures. SF@H also provided students – and, for the first time, their families – with access to food during home-based learning. While this has been important, we find that even when the state provides SF@H as a pandemic relief measure, low-income families are subject to additional burdens that accentuate the inequalities previously ameliorated at schools.Alternate :ResumenEl cierre de escuelas durante la pandemia del COVID-19 ha dificultado el acceso a los alimentos de los estudiantes, en particular de los estudiantes de bajos ingresos que dependen de las escuelas para sus comidas diarias principales. Los programas de alimentación escolar se han adaptado a las condiciones de la pandemia al proporcionar alimentación escolar en el hogar (SF@H). Exploramos conceptualmente las geografías cambiantes de la alimentación escolar durante la pandemia al examinar las adaptaciones del Programa Nacional de Alimentación Escolar (PNAE) de Brasil y luego compararlo con la provisión regular de alimentos escolar. Nuestra investigación se basa en 43 entrevistas con funcionarios públicos y representantes de la sociedad civil de todas las regiones de Brasil, desde tecnócratas de alto nivel hasta personal de primera línea comprometidos con la alimentación escolar. La respuesta rápida a través de la política nacional de alimentación escolar permitió a las escuelas proporcionar alimentos en el hogar como un esfuerzo de alivio a la pandemia mediante la creación de novedosas geografías alimentarias alternativas que mantuvieron a las escuelas en el corazón de los sistemas agroalimentarios. SF@H brinda a los agricultores locales familiares un canal de comercialización alternativo para aquellos comprometidos debido a las medidas de distanciamiento social. SF@H también proporcionó a los estudiantes y, por primera vez, a sus familias, acceso a alimentos durante el aprendizaje en el hogar. Si bien esto ha sido importante, encontramos que incluso cuando el Estado proporciona SF@H como medida de alivio a la pandemia, las familias de bajos ingresos están sujetas a cargas adicionales que acentúan las desigualdades que antes se mejoraban en las escuelas.

Becoming digital citizens: covid-19 and urban citizenship regimes in India

This article examines how technopolitical response to covid-19 resulted in differentiated urban citizenship regimes in India's smart cities. Using Isin and Ruppert's framework, we argue that India's digital citizens enacted their subjectivities in response to acts of calling, closing and opening in the cyberspace. Acts of calling encouraged citizens to participate and engage with the state online, systematically excluding those who did not have access to digital infrastructures. Acts of closing were implemented through the technologies of the surveillance state diminishing rights of freedom and privacy. In response, digital citizens enacted their political subjectivities through acts of opening by means of online campaigns, petitions and citizen journalism. Although the risk of technocracy remains real, we argue that the interplay of calling, closing and opening digital acts enabled the enactment of digital citizenship in India by raising the old questions of social citizenship rights and new forms of data and digital rights.

Keep it complex! Prodi's curse and the EU fiscal governance regime complex

The EU fiscal framework has gradually morphed into a regional regime complex through various reforms of the preventive and corrective arms of the Stability and Growth Pact. A regime complex encourages actors to arbitrage between partially overlapping, parallel and nested rules. By drawing on this central insight, this article demonstrates that regime complexity enables member states to respect the letter but not the spirit of the fiscal rules to lower the cost of compliance. It further shows empirically how regime complexity weakens technocratic enforcement capacity when authority is dispersed across multiple levels of governance by focusing on the example of the general escape clauses during the coronavirus pandemic.

The technocratic reason in the government of emergency. A theoretical analysis on the management of the Covid-19 epidemic

The assumption on which this contribution is based that in liberal democracies the "political space" represents the confrontational space of coexistence in which lives are governed by "legitimate" power of politics. What we have observed over the course of about two years now is that the epidemic must be understood within this space and, as happens for the observation of all "social facts", it cannot be considered as an isolated phenomenon. The history of epidemics is therefore mainly a "social and political history";just think of the way in which the use of measures to counter the contagion redesigns the meaning of coexistence and power relations. The Covid-19 epidemic comes at the end of an economic crisis that began in 2008 and should not be disconnected from this, despite the tendency in public opinion and the media to consider it an "external factor", exclusively a health issue relating above all to "vital processes". Therefore, this contribution intends to propose an examination of the "government of the emergency" in liberal, capitalist, de-collectivized societies through a theoretical approach (biopolitical and dialectical) which, on the one hand, investigates the relationship between government, power and contagion control devices and, on the other hand, explores the presuppositions of the crisis of knowledge that increasingly gives way to "technique" which becomes an administrative tool.

Sensible Thought, Coexistence, and the Revolutionary Impulse to Love

This essay locates the concept of sentido pensante or sensible thought within the recent historical events of the coronavirus pandemic to ask the question on the systems of production of epistemology. It invites the reader, at the insistence of Raúl Fornet Betancourt, to incisively investigate our current masked reality of manufactured consent, to cultivate convivencia, and to make room akin to a trench of ideas for the flourishing of a revolutionary love in our time. (English) [ FROM AUTHOR] Este ensayo ubica el concepto de sentido pensante o sensible “thought” dentro de los recientes acontecimientos históricos de la pandemia de coronavirus para plantear la pregunta sobre los sistemas de producción de la epistemología. Invita al lector, ante la insistencia de Raúl Fornet Betancourt, a indagar con incisividad en nuestra actual realidad enmascarada de consentimiento fabricado, a cultivar la convivencia, y a abrir espacio a una trinchera de ideas para el florecimiento de un amor revolucionario en nuestro tiempo. (Spanish) [ FROM AUTHOR] Copyright of Utopia y Praxis Latinoamericana is the property of Revista de Filosofia-Universidad del Zulia and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full . (Copyright applies to all s.)

The politics of the ECB's market-based approach to government debt

The European Central Bank's (ECB) market-based treatment of government debt was an important cause of the 2010-2012 eurozone crisis. This article analyses the political dynamics that govern the ECB's approach to government debt from the earliest discussions on Economic and Monetary Union to the COVID-19 pandemic. The first part of the article traces the process of institutional transformation that led the ECB to introduce its strict market-based approach in 2005. I explain this development in terms of a strategy of depoliticization that brings the ECB to introduce a rigid and rule-based approach to designing its collateral framework. The article's second part explains why the ECB stuck to the market-based approach in the eurozone crisis but not in the pandemic crisis. Although its ill-defined constitutional role led the ECB to disavow its agency earlier, in March 2020, it had become clear that this strategy had stopped working and it was quickly abandoned in the face of a new bond market panic.

Permission to bail out EU's national flag carriers? Technocratic and political determinants of commission approval of state aid to national airlines in difficulties in the pre-COVID era

The enforcement of EU state aid rules is often portrayed as mainly driven by technocratic standards, but there are indications that political factors also play a role. However, their exact impact and relationship with technocratic factors remain unknown. This article studies under which technocratic and political conditions the Commission approves or does not approve state aid to national airlines. Based on a crisp-set Qualitative Comparative Analysis of all 14 cases of alleged state aid to national airlines between 2004 and 2019, the article shows that both the approval and non-approval of aid are predominantly dependent upon the Commission's technocratic assessment: a low degree of market distortion turns out to be a sufficient condition for the approval of aid, whereas a high degree of market distortion is a necessary condition for the non-approval of aid. However, in some cases, political factors are decisive in determining enforcement outcomes.

Knowing How to Act Well in Time.

Numerous scholars in the social sciences and humanities have speedily analysed and interpreted the COVID-19-induced social and political crisis. While the commitment to address an urgent topic is to be appreciated, this article suggests that the combination of confidence in the applicability of one's tools and belief in the certainty of the available knowledge can be counter-productive in the face of a phenomenon that in significant respects is unprecedented. Starting out from the plurality of forms of knowledge that are mobilized to analyse COVID-19 and its consequences as well as the lack of any clearly hegemonic knowledge, the article tries to understand how a limited convergence in the politico-medical responses to the crisis emerged, and speculates on what would have happened if this had not been the case. In conclusion, it is argued that this pandemic demands a greater awareness of the uncertainty of our knowledge and of the consequences of our actions, both in terms of being situated in time and of aiming at timeliness.