Last year I worked at an online school. In a normal year, students would come into the building for additional help and to do supervised tests. Last year, students did not enter the building. Tutoring was done over video conferencing, and testing was done using an online-proctoring system, integrity advocate.

Integrity advocate, for the most part, was a great solution to in-person proctoring. The issue with integrity advocate is that students could hide their phone from the webcam. The program would catch students looking down at something, but had no way to decipher if they were looking at their phone or a calculator.

As teachers at the school, we knew the existence of photomath. In previous years, if students used photomath to complete their assignments, they would only be hurting themselves. They would eventually need to come into the building, and write a test without their phone. Although, in 2020 with the switch to integrity advocate, students could hide their phone from the webcam, take photos of their test, and receive full solutions from photomath.

We were in discussion with how we could combat and prevent students using the app. We changed many questions to word problems, which integrity advocate cannot recognize, but this is not possible for all questions as tests need to have a variety of problems. We never came to a solution.