The fear of Big Brother: The potential negative side-effects of proctored exams

Synthesis: The fear of Big Brother — a large-scale four-wave study of 1,760 students across 105 courses during pandemic-era remote exams finds that online proctoring significantly increases test anxiety, even though it has no effect on the temptation to cheat, perceived exam difficulty, or performance. The study quantifies which student and contextual factors reduce or amplify that anxiety, and argues that the decision to use online proctoring must weigh its undesirable side-effect on test anxiety.

Conijn, Kleingeld, Matzat, & Snijders (2022) provide the strongest empirical evidence to date on the "Big Brother" concern with proctored exams: surveillance raises anxiety without deterring cheating. The title captures the central finding — students' fear of being watched is a real, measurable negative side-effect of online proctoring.

Method

• Sample: Four waves of survey data across one year of pandemic-era teaching at a Dutch university; 1,760 students within 105 courses.
• Design: Multi-level analyses with crossed random effects of student and course, comparing on-campus, online non-proctored, and online proctored exams.
• Outcomes: Self-reported temptation to cheat, test anxiety, perceived exam difficulty, and performance; plus student characteristics (learning strategies, internet literacy, study-space access, reliable technology, financial stress, gender).

Key Findings

• Proctoring raises test anxiety. Students in proctored online exams reported higher test anxiety than in non-proctored online exams (β = 0.60, p < 0.001); online exams generally raised anxiety vs. on-campus (β = 0.82). 38% of variance in test anxiety resided at the student level and 14% at the course level.
• No effect on cheating. Proctoring had no effect on the temptation to cheat — directly challenging the integrity rationale for surveillance.
• No effect on exam difficulty or performance. Proctoring did not change perceived difficulty or exam grades; the test-anxiety→performance negative relationship was not amplified by proctoring.
• Who is most anxious: Female students, students with financial stress, and those lacking a dedicated study space or reliable technology reported higher test anxiety. Internet literacy and environmental-structuring learning strategies reduced anxiety.
• Key message: surveillance imposes a real anxiety cost, concentrated on already-vulnerable students (tool-novices, those with weaker home environments), with no cheating benefit.

What this means for practice

• Assessment professionals. Prefer less intrusive integrity assurance — limiting exam time, restricting access to already-completed questions, and randomizing question and answer order — over Remote Proctoring, which raised test anxiety (β = 0.60, p < 0.001) while showing no effect on the temptation to cheat.
• Administrators. Open on-campus study spaces with reliable internet during proctored exams and route support to the students carrying the highest anxiety burden — those with financial stress, low internet literacy, and weaker home study environments — since proctoring widens rather than narrows inequity.
• Instructors. Teach time management and environmental structuring explicitly and give students practice with the exam platform, because these learning strategies and skills are the ones associated with lower test anxiety.
• Designers. Build the alternative to surveillance into the assessment design itself, treating authentic assessment as the default where the integrity case for proctoring remains unproven.

Limitations

• All outcomes were voluntary self-reports from 1,760 students across 105 courses at a single Dutch university; self-selection toward higher-motivated students and socially desirable answering (including understated cheating) may bias the estimates.
• The study could not map the full side-effect space: it did not measure proctoring's effects on Privacy and security perceptions, so the total cost of surveillance remains unknown.
• Cheating temptation and anxiety were reported rather than observed, and students may be less aware of peers cheating in online exams than on campus, which weakens the null-effect conclusion.

Citation

Conijn, R., Kleingeld, A., Matzat, U., & Snijders, C. (2022). The fear of Big Brother: The potential negative side-effects of proctored exams. Journal of Computer Assisted Learning, 38(6), 1521–1534.