In 2020, a Canadian university employee named Ian Linkletter became increasingly alarmed by a new kind of technology that was exploding in use with the pandemic. It was meant to detect cheating by college and high-school students taking tests at home, and claimed to work by watching students' movements and analyzing sounds around them through their webcams and microphones to automatically flag suspicious behavior. So Linkletter accessed a section of the website of one of the anti-cheating companies, named Proctorio, intended only for instructors and administrators. He shared what he found on social media. Now Linkletter, who became a prominent critic of the technology, has been sued by the company. But he is not the only one.

It was a windfall for online proctoring companies, but thrust the pitfalls of the practice into the spotlight. Being watched by a faceless stranger or artificial intelligence provokes anxiety or worse, according to some students and teachers. Educators and privacy advocates raised concerns about the software's efficacy, invasiveness and potential to discriminate against some disabled candidates. Online proctoring companies are now updating their user experiences, partly to address some of the critiques. "In 2020 we were like a train going 100 miles an hour, and we couldn't stop it," said Proctorio Inc. founder and chief executive Mike Olsen, noting that the number of exams proctored by the company in April 2020 rose 900% from a year earlier.

When Amanda Kemper found out that artificial intelligence would help monitor students during her mechanical engineering class's final exam this summer, she was worried. Like many students, Kemper's classes at the University of Wisconsin-Madison shifted online suddenly in the spring due to the ongoing pandemic. With remote learning came remote exams: Starting in July, the university let instructors use software from Honorlock, which is one of numerous companies that can record video -- and much more -- of students as they take tests, and uses AI to point out any behavior that looks like cheating. Kemper learned about Honorlock a week before her final exam and she had a number of concerns. She didn't like the idea of being recorded and having that recording sent to her professor.

The coronavirus pandemic has been a boon for the test proctoring industry. About half a dozen companies in the US claim their software can accurately detect and prevent cheating in online tests. Examity, HonorLock, Proctorio, ProctorU, Respondus and others have rapidly grown since colleges and universities switched to remote classes. While there's no official tally, it's reasonable to say that millions of algorithmically proctored tests are happening every month around the world. Proctorio told the New York Times in May that business had increased by 900% during the first few months of the pandemic, to the point where the company proctored 2.5 million tests worldwide in April alone. I'm a university librarian and I've seen the impacts of these systems up close.