Abstract
This paper covers secrecy from the vantage point of recent technological initiatives designed to detect cheating and deception in educational contexts as well as to monitor off-campus social media speech code violations. Many of these systems are developed and implemented by third-party corporate entities who claim practices to be proprietary and secret. The outsourcers involved in these efforts have provided one level of secrecy and educational administrators involved yet another level, thus constructing "nested black boxes." Also discussed in this paper is the “paranoid style” of administration, often supported by the surveillance and construction of rosters of potential non-conformists, such as alleged cheaters and speech code violators. The educational technologies described in this article are increasingly applied to workplace practices, with young people being trained in what is deemed acceptable conduct. Secrecy can serve to alter the character of relationships within the educational institutions involved as well as inside the workplaces in which the approaches are increasingly being integrated.
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.
Recommended Citation
Oravec, Jo Ann.
2018.
"Secrecy in Educational Practices: Enacting Nested Black Boxes in Cheating and Deception Detection Systems."
Secrecy and Society
1(2).
DOI: https://doi.org/10.31979/2377-6188.2018.010205
https://scholarworks.sjsu.edu/secrecyandsociety/vol1/iss2/5
