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Is Online Test-Monitoring Here to Stay?

At the end of the exam, the professor receives a report on each student’s over-all "suspicion score," along with a list of moments, marked for an instructor to review, when the software judged that cheating might have occurred. Meanwhile, Proctorio is also monitoring the room around you for unauthorized faces or forbidden materials. Proctorio, which operates as a browser plug-in, can detect whether your gaze is pointed at the camera; it tracks how often you look away from the screen, how much you type, and how often you move the mouse.

It compares your rate of activity to a class average that the software calculates as the exam unfolds, flagging you if you deviate too much from the norm. (Proctorio says that its software does not expel users from exams for noise.) By the time his professor let him back into the test, he had lost a half hour and his heart was racing. He feared that, if he showed physical signs of anxiety, Proctorio was "going to send the video to the professor and say that suspicious activity is going on." The software, he said, "is just not accurate.

So I don’t know if it’s seeing things that aren’t there because of the pigment of my skin." Last spring, during a Zoom meeting with a professor, Yemi-Ese learned that the software had flagged him for moving too much. "I feel like I can’t take a test in my natural state anymore, because they’re watching for all these movements, and what I think is natural they’re going to flag," he told me. His dread of the software only increased after he was kicked out of an exam when a roommate dropped a pot in the kitchen, making a clang that rang through their apartment.

"I had to try to calm down," he said. "A lot of times, there are issues that get publicly printed that are not actually issues," he said. Jarrod Morgan, the chief strategy officer of ProctorU, told me that his company was in need of "relational" rather than technical changes. of ExamSoft, denied that his company’s product performed poorly with dark-skinned people. "What we will own is that we have not done a good enough job explaining what it is we do," he said. Sebastian Vos, the C.E.O.

Proctorio’s list of clients grew more than five hundred per cent, from four hundred in 2019 to twenty-five hundred in 2021, according to the company, and its software administered an estimated twenty-one million exams in 2020, compared with four million in 2019. Fully algorithmic test-monitoring—which is less expensive, and available from companies including Proctorio, ExamSoft, and Respondus Monitor—has expanded even faster. These include ProctorU, which said, in December, that it had administered roughly four million exams in 2020 (up from 1.5 million in 2019), and Examity, which told Inside Higher Ed that its growth last spring exceeded pre-pandemic expectations by thirty-five per cent.