22nd February 2022
Remote proctoring: what's the right service for your organisation?
Many Assessment Organisations are very experienced at delivering digital exams, despite many candidates still having to travel to a test centre and sit them.
However, the pandemic led many test centres to close or reduce their capacity to meet the social distancing requirements. To enable candidates to continue sitting the exams, many assessment organisations have turned to remote proctoring services. This allows candidates to take their exams at home or at a workplace, overseen by a remote proctor via the candidate's computer webcam.
Remote proctoring is convenient for candidates, it allows them to save time on travelling to a test centre, reduces time away from work and helps to protect them against pandemic-related health and safety issues. It allows candidates to pursue qualifications that may be critical to their continued employment or professional development. This also allows for assessment providers to keep their businesses running, while maintaining a community of qualified individuals.
What does a remote proctoring service cover?
A remote proctor will generally oversee a number of candidates. Before the exam starts, they'll help candidates to prepare by:
- Visually checking candidates' identity documents — to help ensure they are who they say they are
- Scanning the room of a candidate — to ensure its suitable for an examination environment, free from possible infractions
- Performing a remote ‘tech check’ such as the candidate's bandwidth, web browser, open tabs and hardware — to ensure they have the capacity to do the exam and be invigilated.
During the exam, the candidates and their screens are recorded to provide a secure, accurate video record of the exam. At the same time, each proctor oversees their assigned candidates and notes any behaviours that may indicate cheating.
Generally, proctors aren't expected to intervene — it's up to the service provider and/or the awarding organisation to analyse the video recordings subsequently to understand whether any cheating has taken place during the exam.
Remote proctoring services can additionally deliver the exams on behalf of the assessment organisation, by integrating with the organisation's question bank.
How does the Civica service stack up?
To meet the needs and expectations of assessment organisations across the UK, we've developed a UK-centric remote proctoring service, which includes cloud storage of all video recordings. We’re also able to provide the service and storage for organisations based in Dutch, Germany and Ireland.
Unlike some other remote proctoring providers who rely on overseas staff, our fully trained proctors are all UK based. They’re fluent English speakers, also offering 2nd line language support to non-native English-speakers during their examination.
The training our proctors undergo include, candidate empathy and customer service, thorough understanding of the process, procedure, and a basic ability to provide technical support.
We focus on ‘one customer per session’ so that a proctor is not having to deal with candidates doing different exams from different Awarding organisations. Most importantly, we ensure all our proctors and reviewers are paid at least the living wage for the important job they do. As this is not a low-skilled job!
In addition to proctoring, we also support organisations in creating, managing and delivering the assessments for candidates, something we have successfully delivered for over twenty years. If the assessment organisation has an existing partner for this service, we can make this transition quick and seamless.
Answering the proportionality question
We understand that the invigilation costs must be proportionate to the nature of the exam, and live remote proctoring may not always be the right answer. We therefore offer service options for assessment organisations to choose from. These options range from most appropriate and cost-effective service according to the exam type and the number of concurrent candidates.
- Record and review. Our standard offer, which records candidates and their screens, and uses artificial intelligence (AI) to identify and flag potential infractions for later review.
- Record and review with a live sample. Our standard offer, providing an enhanced invigilation of a random candidate sample by one or more remote proctors.
- Live. All candidates and their screens are recorded, and all are invigilated live by remote proctors.
The assessment organisation can review and analyse the recordings, alternatively, Civica proctors can do this on their behalf. AI-based flagging helps to make that an efficient process by allowing reviewers to skip to the flagged segments which indicate suspicious behaviour. All final decision-making about potential infractions’ rest with the assessment organisation.
Ready to know more?
Whether your organisation is looking to adopt remote proctoring for the first time, to pilot a set of remotely proctored exams or is ready to switch from an existing service, we're here to help. Click below to discover more about Civica's UK-centric remote proctoring service by getting in touch with us.