Excuse me ma’am, I was having a full on breakdown mid test 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 wasn’t cheating"—to find out that a family member had died.

"Now proctorio has a video of me crying," the student wrote. Anti-online-proctoring Twitter accounts popped up, such as @Procteario and @ProcterrorU. The surge in online-proctoring services has launched a wave of complaints. A letter of protest addressed to the CUNY administration has nearly thirty thousand signatures. One student tweeted, "professor just emailed me asking why i had the highest flag from proctorio. He took several tests while displaced from his home by the winter storm that devastated Texas in February, which forced him to crash with a series of friends.

Still, he managed to raise his grades back to pre-pandemic levels, even in classes that required Proctorio. (The situation, in addition to its other challenges, deprived him of his usual light setup.) By the end of his senior year, Yemi-Ese was still struggling to get admitted to every Proctorio exam. "After I figured out nothing was going to change, I guess I got numb to it," he said. Yemi-Ese’s grades dropped precipitously early in the pandemic, a problem he attributed in large part to Proctorio.

He was initially unconcerned when he learned that several of his classes, including a course in life-span development and another in exercise physiology, would be administering exams using Proctorio, a software program that monitors test-takers for possible signs of cheating. The first time Yemi-Ese opened the application, positioning himself in front of his laptop for a photo, to confirm that his Webcam was working, Proctorio claimed that it could not detect a face in the image, and refused to let him into his exam.

Yemi-Ese turned on more lights and tilted his camera to catch his face at its most illuminated angle; it took several tries before the software approved him to begin. "Being in sports for as long as I was, and getting yelled at by coaches, I don’t get stressed much," he said. When the coronavirus pandemic began, Femi Yemi-Ese, then a junior at the University of Texas at Austin, began attending class and taking exams remotely, from the apartment that he shared with roommates in the city.

A former Division 1 football player, majoring in kinesiology, Yemi-Ese had never suffered from anxiety during tests. Now, whenever he sits down to take an exam using Proctorio, he turns on every light in his bedroom, and positions a ring light behind his computer so that it shines directly into his eyes. "I have a light beaming into my eyes for the entire exam," he said. "That’s hard when you’re actively trying not to look away, which could make it look like you’re cheating." Despite these preparations, "I know that I’m going to have to try a couple times before the camera recognizes me," he said.