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.
SPEAKERS: Scott McFarland, Jarrod Morgan
Transcript:
Scott McFarland 00:01
So, prior to March of 2020, we had already had seven locations and about 350 proctors or so and when March happened, we started getting the calls from the universities and we started working with the professional testing companies who needed the source of revenue and to continue testing their programs, Law School Admissions Council was one such program that came to us for help, and we rapidly began recruiting and hiring proctors in opening centers in other parts of the world. So, we’re now in eight countries, 16 locations between 60 and 100 proctors in each location. Any given day we do between 20,000 and 30,000 exams, and the way that we were able to manage when the pandemic hit is we have built an intelligent routing system. We’re able to really perfect this by doing lots and lots of higher education work, extremely high demand during the finals weeks. We had to perfect the ability to rapidly scale up and scale down in order to do that.
Jarrod Morgan 01:03
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 learn 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 gonna have to wade through all this trouble just to proctor online, right. And the first thing I point out is that an organization that would say that’s 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 exam successfully with ProctorU and how, historically, they have always reported over a 90% satisfaction rate with their experience with their online proctor.
Scott McFarland 02:07
Today, we do about 98.7% of all test takers that come in for their exam, they get into the their exam, within their exam window. And that’s pretty much unheard. Frankly, you know, lots of our other competitors that are in this space, appear to have struggled during the pandemic. The car crashes described by some of our competitors certainly don’t pertain to us. The team here has done an excellent job in bringing up a very scalable, efficient, effective, and secure proctoring operation.
Jarrod Morgan 02:41
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.