Thats my experience + they are listening the whole time. A loud noise from another room disqualified a coworker of mine.

Hell, I got flagged for possible cheating in an online proctored test because I had a whiteboard behind me that had unrelated equations on it or some nonsense. I didn't even look at them lol.

The instructor reviewed the footage, laughed, and said, "wow, what a pain in the butt to deal with" and cancelled the alert or whatever. Almost all the classes I've taken online have been way harder for potential cheating than in person classes.

I'll say this too, I took a course called something like "applied mathematical methods" online a long time ago. That class's final basically said, "use whatever resources you want except for other people" - ChatGPT would have probably made short work of the exam, but at the time, even with the power of the internet about 10 years ago, there's no way I could have used it to help me. I doubt even teaming up would have helped that much to be honest lol.

I had 24 hours to do the test and it was pretty hard to get done in that time. I think it took me something like 5 or 6 hours to do it? Making your tests muderously difficult is one way to handle the temptation to cheat in online courses. I don't know that that's the best solution from a pedagogy standpoint, but hey, I'm not a prof.