Amadeus Lyceum is a secondary school in The Netherlands with around 2,000 students. The school uses Woots as its assessment platform and runs a Bring Your Own Device policy, meaning students take exams on their own laptops. Geography teacher Gijs Bos has an affinity for IT and helped build the setup that made secure digital exams possible.
The challenge: securing digital exams on student devices
Gijs had long believed in the benefits of digital exams. No printing, richer source materials, faster and more consistent grading. But every time the technical setup let students down, it gave skeptical colleagues another reason to resist. "If it goes wrong once, they immediately think it's a bad idea. Those negative experiences tend to stick."
The school's first attempt at securing exams in Woots involved the exam security solution Safe Exam Browser. It didn't hold up. "It simply wasn't stable enough," Gijs says. During some exams, around one in five students couldn't even get the exam to launch on their device at all. In a school environment, word travels fast. "You've already lost the battle at that point."
“During some exams, around one in five students couldn't even get the exam to launch on their device at all.”
Gijs Bos — Teacher at Amadeus Lyceum
Woots offers ways to monitor exam sessions, such as flagging when a student has left the exam tab, but that kind of signal is hard to act on. "In that situation, a student can always say: I didn't do anything. And then you can't really prove what happened." That's why preventing cheating, rather than detecting it, is important for Amadeus Lyceum.
The solution: same exam workflow in a locked down environment
Where Safe Exam Browser had struggled with crashing sessions and students locked out before the exam even began, Schoolyear proved stable from the start.
When Gijs tested Schoolyear alongside Woots, the workflow was straightforward and easy. Students start their exam in Woots exactly as they normally would. What changes is that Schoolyear locks the device down at the same time so that students can’t cheat. "You just tick one box in Woots and it works."
Once the exam starts, students can only access what the exam requires, such as a whitelisted web page, PDF file, or video file. Everything else is closed off. "With Schoolyear, we suddenly had a tool at our disposal that put laptops into a kind of kiosk mode, into an exam setting," Gijs says. "Students simply can’t access other applications."
“With Schoolyear, we suddenly had a tool at our disposal that put student-owned laptops into a kind of kiosk mode.”
Gijs Bos — Teacher at Amadeus Lyceum
Schoolyear also works well on both Windows laptops and MacBooks, which is important for a school where students bring their own devices. That reliability was one of the key reasons for switching. After piloting with several classes, the school made Schoolyear the standard for all digital exams.
The result: a calmer exam environment for students and invigilators
Instead of trying to piece together what happened after an exam, Schoolyear prevents problems from occurring in the first place. "Schoolyear is fantastic for that," Gijs says. "We simply don't have to worry at all. As long as Schoolyear is turned on during an exam, students can't really do anything wrong."
As long as Schoolyear is turned on during an exam, students can't really do anything wrong."
Gijs Bos — Teacher at Amadeus Lyceum
That changed what running exams feels like. The pressure on invigilators dropped to almost nothing. "An invigilator actually has nothing to do during a Schoolyear exam," Gijs says. "Cheating is impossible, as students have no way to look at each other's laptops either. For the invigilator, it's the most comfortable exam there is." Teacher confidence has followed. Most colleagues who were once skeptical now understand the setup well enough to run it themselves. "By now it has become common practice."
Support from the Schoolyear team helped sustain that confidence. "If I call, someone always answers and helps me immediately," Gijs says. "I have the feeling that I'm known there, that I'm heard. And I find that pleasant." For a school still bringing hesitant colleagues along, knowing help is close made a real difference.
What's next: writing papers in the age of AI
With AI tools now widely available, some teachers are rethinking how written work should be assessed. Submitting an essay from home is increasingly difficult to evaluate fairly. A growing group of teachers at Amadeus wants students to write papers live in the classroom instead, on their own laptops, in a controlled environment.
Schoolyear makes that possible. The platform can enable the use of desktop applications like Microsoft Word while cutting students off from personal files, AI assistants, and add-ins. It's a workflow the school is planning to explore further in the near future.
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