Excuse me maam, I was having a full on breakdown mid a and kept pulling tissues. Another protested, i was doing so well till i got an instagram notification on my laptop and i tried to x it out AND I GOT FUCKING KICKED OUT. A third described getting an urgent text from a parent in the middle of an exam and calling back—on speaker phone so my prof would know I wasnt cheating—to find out that a family member had died. Anti-online-proctoring Twitter accounts popped up, such as @Procteario and @ProcterrorU.br />br />The surge in online-proctoring services has launched a wave of complaints. Now proctorio has a video of me crying, the student wrote. One student tweeted, professor just emailed me asking why i had the highest flag from proctorio. A letter of protest addressed to the CUNY administration has nearly thirty thousand signatures. (Harvard urged faculty to move toward open-book exams during the pandemic; if professors felt the need to monitor students, the university suggested observing them in Zoom breakout rooms.) Since last summer, several prominent universities that had signed contracts with Proctorio, including the University of Washington and Baylor University, have announced decisions either to cancel or not to renew those contracts.br />br />But some universities have signed multi-year contracts that opened the door to proctoring in a way that they wont just be able to pull themselves out of, Jesse Stommel, a researcher who studies education technology and the editor of the journal Hybrid Pedagogy, said. Several institutions, including Harvard, Stanford, McGill, and the University of California, Berkeley, have either banned proctoring technology or strongly discouraged its use. Meanwhile, rising vaccination rates and schools plans to reopen in the fall might seem to obviate the need for proctoring software.br />br />They have committed to paying for these services for a long time, and, once youve made a decision like that, you rationalize using the software. (Several universities previously listed as customers on Proctorios Web site told me that they planned to reassess their use of proctoring software, but none had made determinations to end their contracts.) Transgender students have been outed by Proctorios ID Verification procedure, which requires that they pose for a photograph with an I.D.br />br />In video calls with live proctors from ProctorU, test-takers have been forced to remove bonnets and other non-religious hair coverings—a policy that has prompted online pushback from Black women in particular—and students accessing Wi-Fi in public libraries have been ordered to take off protective masks. Students with dark skin described the softwares failure to discern their faces. Other anecdotes call attention to the biases that are built into proctoring programs.br />br />Low-income students have been flagged for unsteady Wi-Fi, or for taking tests in rooms shared with family members. that may bear a previous name. Despite these preparations, I know that Im going to have to try a couple times before the camera recognizes me, he said. Like many test-takers of color, Yemi-Ese, who is Black, has spent the past three semesters using software that reliably struggles to locate his face. When we first spoke, last November, he told me that, in seven exams hed taken using Proctorio, he had never once been let into a test on his first attempt.