Rutgers.eduThe following email message was sent to Rutgers students, faculty, and staff on Oct. 17, 2020.
Members of the Rutgers Community:
As you may know, the Proctortrack software used for remote proctoring in Canvas and Sakai was shut down by its parent company this week following its announcement of a security incident. It is unclear when Proctortrack will be available again.
Rutgers and other universities received little advance notice about this outage, causing a considerable inconvenience for faculty and students. In some instances, professors were forced to cancel exams at the last minute. The situation with Proctortrack is untenable, and Rutgers is now working diligently to find alternative options for remote proctoring. As we do so, we are implementing a vetting process that is speedy, thorough, and attentive to the issues raised by the use of Proctortrack.
We understand the concerns of students related to privacy and security with remote proctoring. At the same time, we recognize the need for faculty to have reliable solutions for assessments conducted remotely. With this in mind, we are working with academic leadership at the university to review guidelines and processes surrounding the use of remote proctoring.
We recognize that this adds to the challenges of a semester that’s already far from normal. Rest assured that the University administration, the Office of Information Technology, and academic support staff will continue to respond to the emerging issues created by the pandemic and the unexpected disruption with proctoring to best support our faculty and students. Additional information on alternatives to Proctortrack will be provided early next week via the learning management systems in use for courses.
If you have questions, please reach out to these contacts:
- Rutgers University–Newark: help@newark.rutgers.edu
- Rutgers University–Camden: idt@camden.rutgers.edu
- Rutgers University–New Brunswick and Rutgers Biomedical and Health Sciences: tlt@docs.rutgers.edu or your local instructional support group
Michele Norin
Senior Vice President and Chief Information Officer