Ethical Issues

If our software had statistics by demographic or captured demographic data, it could facilitate discrimination or lead to bias if one group's statistics were worse than the others. The teacher could see such stats and then develop negative expectations of that group and then grade members of that group worse, even if their work isn't actually worse and the statistics were just a matter of randomness and small sample size. While collecting demographic information could make it easier for a teacher to see if they are serving everyone equally, we have decided not to collect them or use them in statistics to avoid this problem, even though our client requested such a feature.

Our software is also somewhat sensitive from a privacy standpoint. While our particular client does not use in class "spotting" performance to grade students, other users may, so in-class spotting performance could be associated with grades for other students. Academic records are private information, so the spotting performance of students should not be accessible to anyone other than the teacher and their TAs. Our app conforms to this as students have no way to access their or anyone else’s records, and the teacher must invite other users to give them access to their class and records (if the teacher is going to inappropriately share academic records, there’s nothing that could be done with or without an app).

Our app has limited user interaction (users can invite other users to gain access to their class), which could be abused by inviting other users to classes with harassing, dangerous, or scaming content as their “students”, class name, or username. This is largely mitigated by the ability to disable all class invites and ban particular users from inviting the user to classes. Users that have been invited to other people’s classes could also maliciously delete, edit, or add data (e.g. a TA could login and give bad ratings for students they dislike or good ones for ones they like). This is mitigated by the fact that logs are kept, so it would be clear if someone entered ratings on a day that class wasn’t held, or skipped a large number of people to give someone in particular a particular rating. This is also mitigated by the nature of the app. A user has no reason to share their class with anyone who is not involved in the actual teaching of the course, so–while malicious use is possible–it is not much more likely than it already was by trusting someone else to assist with teaching their course.