Moving high-stakes exams online

ENS is a leading insurance institution in Brazil with an enviable legacy of illustrious academicians and a history that spans five decades. The Brazilian government hence had authorized the Institute to certify professionals all over Brazil, in many lines of business, especially in the insurance market. Before the pandemic, ENS had customarily imparted in-person assessments at their institutes through face-to-face learning and some online until 2020. However, in March 2020, the country went into COVID-19 induced lockdown. The situation warranted the need to chalk out a strategy to maintain academic and examination continuity as students were confined to their homes.

Academia made significant efforts to migrate all in-person learning modalities online. And it had to adapt the exams as well to the same format. However, the question emanating from this massive transition was: If ENS shifted its high-stakes certification examinations to the online format, could it still safeguard its exams’ integrity, fairness, and transparency remotely?

Listed below are the requirements ENS cataloged to enable continuity in giving and taking exams online:

ENS sought a secure, leading-edge and user-friendly platform to lend its faculty complete control over their exams. Accordingly, it mandated adequate technological interventions to conduct hassle-free examinations online, such as, help in creating and managing different question paper templates, automating workflows with real-time evaluation and gaining end-to-end encryption.

ENS students had taken their certification exams online, albeit occasionally, via an LMS. However, administering exams online manifested concerns such as maintaining the integrity of exams, which also dictated the need for linking the institute’s LMS to a robust online proctoring system. Hence, ENS mandated a multi-layered proctoring system that offered real-time monitoring of candidates and an anti-cheating environment.

A learning management system provides flexibility to conduct all forms of training. So, ENS wanted to ensure that all stakeholders had unhindered and complete access to its LMS. Hence, the management mandated a system that could easily integrate with the institution’s LMS and provide a holistic assessment experience for both the test taker and evaluators. So, academia sought a service provider that could curate its offerings within its LMS, from exam governance and scalability to best-in-class proctoring.

ENS was ultimately shifting to virtual exams for the first time. Therefore, it required unwavering and continual customer support to understand and administer online proctored exams and aid the participants during the drive.

ENS hosted students in cities across Brazil for its training programs. To keep remote-connectivity-related issues at bay, the institution sought a partnership with a reliable, robust, and ready-to-use remote proctoring provider, which is location agnostic, works at scale, and sets up a hassle-free connection between faculty and students.

Conducting high-stakes exams all over the country was no mean feat. Such exams demanded complex, expensive logistics operations, including but not limited to personnel allocation, the printing of exam copies, the booking of venues for administering tests, setting up infrastructure for proctoring, checking and publishing results, etc. The challenge was to replace all of that with a simpler, more secure process.

Ensuring academic integrity using MPaaS (Mettl’s Proctoring as a Service)

MPaaS, an ultramodern, powerful proctoring plugin setup, enabled ENS to conduct secure online exams within its LMS. MPaaS was plugged in to extend the test-taker’s ability to sit the exam from the institute’s existing learning management system. Additionally, remote invigilation and robust security features were seamlessly integrated into the LMS to weed out any possibility of compromising the integrity of online exams.

Anti-cheating protection

The students needed to enable proctoring on their devices before the exam. They had to accept sharing their screen, video and audio. With one-to-one and one-to-many proctoring features, live proctoring allowed human invigilators at the institute’s Rio de Janeiro branch to keep a watchful eye on all candidates across all the cities in Brazil. Additionally, a live chat possibility granted the invigilators ease to chat with students to assuage their concerns or warn them.

Auto-generated, instantaneous proctoring reports

Mercer | Mettl’s provided rich, actionable insights to the administrators. An auto-generated report underlined the candidate’s integrity score for a proctored session. With these real-time reports, examiners could quickly identify and filter out candidates who might have resorted to unfair means during the test. The AI-based proctoring tool flagged any deviation from candidate’s side and recorded details of the proctoring sessions from start to finish. The reports based on that analysis were well-detailed. That was vital for ENS in maintaining the authenticity of the certification and assuring that only the deserving candidates were awarded the certificate.

Offering a comprehensive proctoring suite

Amid looming uncertainty, maintaining exam’s integrity was a significant concern. After all, the rigor of the test-taking process had to be synonymous with the institute’s ethos and values. Therefore, a sophisticated suite of proctoring features was employed, with an unwavering focus on monitoring, scrutinizing, and analyzing candidates’ behaviors to maintain the institute’s values.

Given the diversity of the candidate pool, ENS specifically wanted to ascertain the genuineness of applicants taking the exam. It was also concerned about the candidates’ test-taking experience. Hence, the Mercer | Mettl’s team enabled a 3-point candidate authentication system necessitating candidates to share their screen, audio and video feed live. The three-point authentication process comprised the following steps:

• First, the students opened the webcam and clicked their photos.
• An OTP was also shared on the registered mobile number for further clarity.
• They then placed their ID proof on the camera.

The proctors, available around the clock, verified every detail against the registration details to authenticate every applicant’s identity. These vital steps ensured that the candidate writing the exam was not an impostor but in fact a genuine person.

Mercer | Mettl enabled advanced AI proctoring to help ENS find certain defaulters and digressions to protect exam integrity. With over 98% accuracy, the intelligent algorithm helped ENS’ in-house proctors flag suspicious cases, such as the detection of mobile phones, non-visibility of face, presence of an additional person, etc.

Mercer | Mettl team provided continual support to the institute to help ENS gain a nuanced understanding of the platform. In addition, it supported the college staff to make the desired transition from the traditional means of conducting the examination.

The way forward

ENS has chosen to continue using the Mercer | Mettl online proctoring solutions for the foreseeable future. The reason is that it comprehended that the return to normalcy is a long way off, and a pause in academic continuity could negatively impact students’ careers. Hence, academia plans to continue employing Mercer Mettl proctoring tools for high-stakes exams.