Ethical Issues

Identify any ethical issues raised by your software. For example:

Are users' privacy expectations met by your software?
Could the use of your software result in racial, gender, religious, or any other type of discrimination? How does your software try to mitigate this problem?
Can your software by abused by some users to cause harm to other users? or to the public at large? How do you mitigate it?

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. These days TKTK