At the beginning of the pandemic, academic institutions and professional credentialing programs needed to accurately measure their test-takers’ knowledge despite the new logistical challenges. Meazure Learning (formerly ProctorU) had to find a way to scale quickly in order to fill that need for new and existing partners. The results: We rapidly hired and trained new proctors and support staff, going from 7 locations with 350 proctors total to 16 locations with 60 – 100 proctors at each location.
In this video, Meazure Learning Chief Strategy Officer Jarrod Morgan and former Chief Executive Officer Scott McFarland share how we did it while still maintaining our high standard of quality.
SPEAKER: Jarrod Morgan
Video Transcript:
Jarrod Morgan 00:01
If 2020 taught us anything, it’s that you can’t just rely on a test center network to serve your candidate population around the world, you have to use the internet, you have to use things like online proctoring for business continuity. We also learned that online proctoring isn’t rife with the technology issues and the security issues that everyone thought we would have all along, right, you’re able to scale this in a way that works for candidates. And we certainly learned that the Netflix generation expects to test this way now. They saw it last year, they liked it, the data shows that they liked it, and people are going to continue to want to test this way, now and in the future.
Now, some organizations will say there’s lots of technology issues or support tickets, your candidates are going to have to wade through all this trouble, just to proctor online, right? And the first thing I’d point out, is that an organization that would say that is probably not very good at online proctoring, themselves. The second thing I would point out, is that you should ask the millions of candidates that have taken exams successfully with ProctorU and how historically they have always reported over a 90% satisfaction rate with their experience with their online proctor. There are millions of people that have taken exams this way, particularly over the pandemic, right? Lots of people that have never taken an exam this way successfully were able to take this exam, right from their home, securely, and in a way that allowed them to do it right when they were ready at night, on the weekends, without having to travel anywhere, right?
So certainly, there are technology issues, there are going to be technology issues in any kind of piece of tech that you use, but what really matters is going to that satisfaction score, figuring out how your candidates are actually having the process.
So, one of the things that people often talk about online proctoring is that is it less secure than the traditional method? A lot of times when that argument comes up, we fail to acknowledge that there’s lots of issues with test centers, there always has been right? You have organizations like testking.com, you can go on that website right now and purchase any number of exams that have been stolen from test centers, right? When that happens to an organization in a test center environment, what do you do? What do you do to find out where the leak happened? What test center? What organization? What location caused that breach, right? Very difficult to find out after the fact. If you ever had a situation where you were wondering what happened after the fact in an online proctoring circumstance, you can actually go back and watch individual exams, rewatch, and re-proctor them after the fact, use new context, new techniques, and figure out if there was a leak, where did it happen, right?
And so when we talk about security, it’s not always about is it cheat-proof, right? Because cheat-proof has never been the standard, it’s certainly not in the old way. But for us, security is about having insight, and the ability to look into each individual exam and say, what happened with this exam? What happened with this candidate? Is this where a breach happened? And then figure out what happened and how we can plug it in the future. That’s what security means in online proctoring.
So the way that we think about cheating in an online proctored environment is sort of like a funnel, right? At the top of the funnel is how many candidates do we actually test? And at the bottom of the funnel is how many people did we actually have a cheating report for, someone that we caught cheating? Between those two numbers, there’s all sorts of information that we can report back to an organization, such as how many times did a proctor have to intervene in an exam when someone did something, maybe outside of the rules, but not necessarily breaching an exam? Or how many times did a candidate show up to the exam with material that they’re not allowed to have? And all of that sort of feeds down to the bottom number, which is how many people have cheated and those numbers in the middle actually tell you a lot more about your candidate base, how they’re interacting with test content, whether they’re confused about the rules of the exam, and allows us to work together with testing organizations to build a program that’s set for the candidates of today, and really tweak it for their best experience.
It’s often been said that online proctoring is sort of the future of testing, but the future is now, after 2020, right? People expect to test this way and this has to be a part of any program that’s looking to scale.