Proctorio at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam — A Cautionary Case in AI Exam-Proctoring Bias

In September 2020, Robin Pocornie, a Black student at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam (VU), sat a remote exam using Proctorio, an AI anti-cheating tool that verifies identity via webcam and face-detection. The software repeatedly failed to recognise her face, logging 'face not found' and 'room too dark' errors even after she shone a lamp directly at herself — an experience she said other students of colour also reported.

In July 2022, Pocornie filed a complaint with the Netherlands Institute for Human Rights. In December 2022 the Institute issued an interim finding that she had presented sufficient evidence of algorithmic discrimination, shifting the burden of proof to VU.

In its final judgment of October 2023, the Institute concluded VU had not discriminated through its use of the software itself, but had discriminated in how it handled her complaint; it explicitly stated the ruling 'does not rule out' that Proctorio or similar AI software could cause discrimination in other cases.

The case sits inside a well-established evidence base — echoing Buolamwini and Gebru's Gender Shades research, with one Dutch report citing roughly 30% lower recognition accuracy on darker skin tones — and stands as a cautionary example of an AI tool reaching national-university scale before its bias risks and complaint-handling procedures were adequately tested or governed.