I [James M. Lang] was 21 years old when I first stepped into a college classroom as an instructor. My master’s program had assigned me to teach a composition course and gave me a brief orientation to teaching the week before the semester began. I was so close in age to my students, so nervous about how they would perceive me, and so uncertain about what I was doing that I had precisely one goal for the first day of the semester: Get through it.

A vulnerability detected last year in an online-proctoring software used by more than 2,000 American colleges is raising new alarm bells for experts, who say that too many institutions — eager to assure the academic integrity of online assessments — have failed to evaluate those platforms and weigh the risk of cyberattacks.