Amsterdam student says Proctorio exam software repeatedly failed to detect her face; rights body found no discrimination but faulted complaint handling
During the 2020/21 academic year, when exams at VU Amsterdam were held online because of the pandemic, some exams required students to run Proctorio proctoring software, which according to the Netherlands Institute for Human Rights used face-detection algorithms during a pre-exam webcam check to judge whether the student was in view. A master's student says the software had trouble recognising her, that she regularly received 'face not found' or 'room too dark' messages, lost time, shone a bright lamp into her face while taking exams, and experienced stress and a feeling of insecurity; she suspected the failures were linked to her dark skin and complained to the Institute in July 2022. In an interim ruling of 7 December 2022 the Institute found sufficient indications for a presumption of discrimination. In its final ruling of 17 October 2023 it found that the university had proved it had not discriminated against her by using Proctorio: on the exam where her setup took longer than average (31 March 2021), the webcam check failed three times and she passed within eight seconds after the helpdesk advised her to remove her glasses, a known Proctorio problem the Institute treated as unrelated to skin colour; a restart during that exam was very likely caused by an unstable internet connection; and it considered it plausible that she had no need to keep a lamp shining in her face for long periods. It found that the university had discriminated in handling her complaint, which took from 1 October 2021 to 11 May 2022 to be taken up. The university apologised that she had not felt heard.
AI involvement reported · Causal attribution disputed · 4 sources · Added 28/10/2026