Hanken School of Economics is a Finnish business university with campuses in Helsinki and Vaasa. It serves roughly 2,900 students and is known for its strong focus on research and multilingual education. Hanken is a triple crowned institution, as it holds EQUIS, AACSB and AMBA accreditations, placing it among a small group of internationally recognized business schools in the Nordics. We spoke to Kicka Lindroos, ICT Coordinator at Hanken, about the implementation of Schoolyear.
The challenge: securing exams on student devices
Hanken initially turned to Safe Exam Browser to lock down student devices during BYOD exams. It was a reasonable starting point, but in practice it caused many problems.
Running Safe Exam Browser through Moodle was workable, but it added more workload for which the teachers did the heavy lifting. Safe Exam Browser offers a vast range of configuration options, which might be manageable for an IT specialist, but quickly overwhelming for a teacher. Every setting had to be manually applied inside Moodle, and with so many ways to get it wrong, mistakes were inevitable. “With so many options, there is always room for teachers to accidentally tick the wrong box,” says Kicka.
The most persistent problem was version control, because Safe Exam Browser updates do not install automatically. Every time a new version was released, students had to download and install it themselves before the exam. In practice, that never went smoothly. "There's always somebody who hasn't downloaded the right version," Kicka says. Getting it up and running on the spot was a slow and complicated process, and IT staff spent the opening stretch of many exams troubleshooting.
The pressure to fix this only grew with the rise of AI tools like ChatGPT. "It just made all teachers understand that it’s not so smart to assign take-home assessments anymore," Kicka says. Supervised, on-campus exams became non-negotiable.
The solution: locking down student devices with Schoolyear
Kicka discovered Schoolyear at a MoodleMoot event. After careful piloting through fall 2024, Hanken ran its first official exams on Schoolyear in March 2025.
The setup is straightforward for everyone involved. Teachers create their exams in Moodle exactly as they always have. A week before the exam, Hanken's IT team reviews the settings, confirms the exam duration, and adds any extra time for students who require it. When the exam starts, Schoolyear locks the device: it goes into full screen mode, other applications are closed, and students can only access resources the teacher has explicitly approved.
With this new setup, IT staff can focus on running the exam rather than troubleshooting before it has even started. "Complications with Schoolyear have been much easier to solve," Kicka says.
The result: exams that run and integrity that holds
Since launching in March 2025, Hanken has run 3,000 exams through Schoolyear. Operationally, the shift has been significant. IT staff arrive 5-10 minutes before each session, stay until every student is up and running, and then step away. The goal is to eventually hand even that responsibility off to exam supervisors, which would reduce IT involvement to near zero on exam day.
Teacher feedback reflects the same pattern: there are little to no complaints, and the same teachers keep using the setup for new exams. "The teachers are satisfied with the BYOD setup. The combination of Moodle and Schoolyear works as it should," Kicka says.
The long-term benefit is structural. BYOD exams mean Hanken does not need to keep expanding its computer lab capacity to accommodate large exam groups. "We save money in the sense that we do not have to have so many computer rooms," Kicka says. Any room on campus can serve as an exam hall. The university gets flexibility, and students get a setup that just works.
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