Proctoring companies like Honorlock that track students' keystrokes and cursor movements during exams to prevent cheating allegedly punish normal behavior
The New York Times' reporting on Honorlock adds a new failure mode to that record — not just invasiveness, but accuracy. The company's keystroke and cursor tracking allegedly punishes normal student behavior, meaning the software's core anti-cheating signal is itself in question.
First-order effects
Students flagged by Honorlock for ordinary typing or cursor movement face wrongful cheating accusations, with the burden falling on them to appeal before grades or academic-integrity records are affected.
Universities running Honorlock inherit the complaint stream directly, since appeals and integrity disputes land on instructors and administrators rather than the vendor.
Second-order effects
Procurement decisions get harder for schools watching this space — some institutions have already responded to comparable pressure by abandoning Proctorio outright, and Honorlock's false-positive problem gives wavering clients a concrete reason to follow.
Rival proctoring vendors can now differentiate on flag accuracy rather than feature lists, forcing competitors to defend their own detection thresholds publicly or risk being lumped into the same criticism.
Third-order effects
If behavioral-flagging keeps producing false accusations at scale, universities may conclude that automated surveillance cannot reliably distinguish cheating from nervousness, pushing procurement toward human review, lower-stakes assessment design, or dropping remote proctoring altogether.
A pattern of documented misflagging across multiple vendors strengthens the case for external oversight of edtech surveillance — turning what is now press criticism and campus petitions into a regulatory question about algorithmic accountability in education.
The trend: Exam-surveillance vendors keep winning institutional customers despite accumulating evidence that their behavioral detection punishes innocent students, setting up a collision between adoption momentum and accuracy-driven defections.
The most serious flaw with #AI-based proctoring systems “may be a human one: educators who overreact when [AI] raises an alert. “Schools seem to be treating it as the word of God...If the computer says you're cheating, you must be cheating” #AutomationBias https://www.nytimes.com…
Always read @kashhill. Many institutions use automated surveillance to decide if a student is cheating on tests as part of remote learning. Often, this means a clunky, unaccountable algorithm barely overseen by low-paid workers abroad has great power. https://www.nytimes.com/...
A recurring pattern in AI that judges people: -The vendor markets it as a one-stop solution to win clients. -But the fine print puts responsibility for oversight on the client (company/school/gov't). -When the tool inevitably makes mistakes, both parties say it's not their fault.…
I, for one, an outraged that software to detect cheating would be improved by using example data in which humans determine students are cheating. https://twitter.com/...
The pandemic was a boom time for companies that remotely monitor test takers bringing #surveillance into academic settings. Some have been frustrated by the invasiveness, glitches, false allegations of cheating & failure to work equally well for all people https://www.nytimes.com…
“Schools seem to be treating it as the word of God,” Cooper Quintin of the @EFF said about anti-cheating software. “If the computer says you're cheating, you must be cheating.” https://www.nytimes.com/...
The software said she might have cheated during her biology exam. The professor she'd never met agreed. The video showed her looking down. She said she was just thinking. How does someone prove they are innocent when the video is ambiguous? https://www.nytimes.com/...
So many important elements in this NYT story, but two I want to highlight: Students not only have this system used against them, they are also used as data to “improve” the tech. Not a new thing, but it's always invasive and gross. https://www.nytimes.com/... https://twitter.com/…
Despite widespread criticism, online proctoring software is still used at many schools around the country. When this student in Florida was accused of cheating by an A.I. monitoring tool and a professor she had never met, her experience was Kafkaesque. https://www.nytimes.com/...
The software said she might have cheated during her biology exam. The professor she'd never met agreed. The video showed her looking down. She said she was just thinking. @kashhill reports on how sideways anti-cheating software can go. https://www.nytimes.com/...
“Normal behaviors are punished by this software.” Except that what counts as abnormal appears to be basic human stuff, the embodied cognition of moving your head + hands to think & remember. Great reporting from @kashhill. https://www.nytimes.com/...