The challenge: replacing proctoring that caught fraud only after the fact
Digital exams at scale
Most of University of Applied Sciences Utrecht's exams are taken digitally, at a volume the university's labs of fixed computers cannot hold. A central testing center of about 20 people runs them all, across the university's 5 faculties and 25 institutes. "Our primary task is supporting education with centrally organized exams," says Lucas Vermeulen, a staff member at the center. Running the exams centrally keeps the process consistent: "Everything is harmonized, including registration deadlines, so there is no inequality between programs."
The scale is the hard part. Alongside those labs, which seat between 400 and 500 students, the center turns ordinary classrooms into exam rooms where students work on their own laptops, a Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) setup. At peak, that can mean around 50 rooms running at once and well over 1,000 students testing simultaneously. In a single exam period, and not an especially busy one, the center logged roughly 700 separate exams covering some 21,000 individual sittings. Securing exams on student-owned devices at that scale, without disruptions, is a challenge.
Recording screens and reviewing footage
Before Schoolyear, the testing center secured BYOD exams with online proctoring. "Students took the exam on their own laptop and the screen was recorded. In principle they could reach everything: applications, the open internet, messaging services," says Sabrine Hakimi, also a staff member at the center. Cheating was not prevented during the exam; it could only be checked for afterwards, by reviewing the recordings.
At University of Applied Sciences Utrecht's volume, that after-the-fact model was heavy. "Afterwards, everything was reviewed by a team of e-invigilators set up to go through all that footage. All findings had to be reported back to the teacher, who then had to judge whether a student had actually done something wrong," Sabrine says. During exam weeks, a team of six e-invigilators worked full time doing nothing but reviewing exams.
The reviewing was also frequently inconclusive, because the reviewers had no complete understanding of what each exam actually allowed. "An e-invigilator does not know the content of the exam, so there were often a lot of ambiguities," Sabrine says. A flagged PDF was a common example: it was hard to tell whether it belonged to the exam or had simply been left open in the background. The uncertainty rippled into grading too, since a flag that had to be checked with the teacher first could hold up results.
Unease among students
Students had their own reservations about allowing proctoring software on their computers. Some preferred not to install it for privacy reasons. The recordings were stored temporarily on a secured server, which many disliked. And the monitoring itself created anxiety. "A virus scanner notification could suddenly appear on screen, get registered by the proctoring software, and flag the student on a suspicion list, through no fault of their own," Sabrine says.
Ruling out managed laptops
The testing center looked at the alternatives. One was a fleet of fully managed laptops. "We also looked at fully managed laptops that IT would have to manage, just like the fixed PCs, setting them up at the start of exam weeks and clearing them away afterwards," Sabrine says. What made this solution attractive was certainty: the testing center would control every device and know it worked before exam day. But the cost and logistics ruled it out. "A managed laptop is an exact copy of our fixed PCs, so we know it is secure and that it always works. But it takes a lot of IT time to manage and keep them all up to date, and logistically you would have to set up 50 rooms with laptops for two weeks, secure them against theft, and store them in fire-resistant cabinets. That adds a lot of cost and time."
The solution: preventing fraud instead of chasing it
A lockdown students can test in advance
Schoolyear offered a different model. Instead of recording the exam and reviewing it later, it locks the student's own device down for the duration. Students start their exam in the testing center's central assessment platform, TestVision, as usual, and Schoolyear closes off everything else. Because students can no longer reach anything outside the exam, cheating is prevented, and there are no recordings left to review afterwards.
Getting students ready before the exam period centers on a single step, the Schoolyear device check. Students run a free online check on their own device on the Schoolyear website, which launches the secure environment and runs through the same startup a real exam would. Problems such as a virus scanner blocking the application surface there, well in advance, rather than during a live exam. Simply running that check prevents a lot of stress on exam day.
A phased introduction
The testing center introduced Schoolyear gradually. "We ran a few pilots of around 60 to 120 students each, starting smaller and growing from there," Sabrine says. In the first exam weeks the team invested heavily in support, setting up practice exams and walking students through every step until they were reassured.
Easy to switch on, easy to oversee
Activating Schoolyear is now part of the exam logistics. University of Applied Sciences Utrecht schedules its exams in Osiris, the student information system widely used across Dutch higher education for course and exam administration. "We have built it into an integration between Osiris and TestVision, so when something is scheduled at a certain location in Osiris, Schoolyear is automatically on. That is a real plus," Sabrine says. She rates that simplicity highest of all: "What Schoolyear is best at is the ease with which you switch it on and use it." And when something does go wrong during an exam, the dashboard shows exactly what happened for each individual student, so a block or an error is easy to trace.
A fallback for unsuitable devices
A small number of devices are not suitable for digital exams, and those students can request a fallback laptop in advance. For everyone else, the testing center keeps three calamity rooms with about 15 laptops each, where students can be sent if a problem cannot be solved on their own device during startup.
The result: calmer exams, less work after them
A calmer experiencefor students
Implementing Schoolyear across the institution was a big operation, but it went well. Students took to it quickly, were notably positive during the pilots, and there have been few real complaints since.
The biggest shift is the calm. The recordings, the on-screen flags, and the worry that came with them are gone. "We would get emails from students saying they were worried their exam would be rejected because something had appeared on screen. You just do not have that anymore," Sabrine says. What Schoolyear has brought, she sums up, is more calm among students and testing center staff alike.
Less hassle behind the scenes
For Lucas, the gain is structural. "With Schoolyear, you secure the exams proactively instead of reactively, after the fact. This creates calm for students, clarity for teachers, and less hassle with the e-invigilators you no longer need," he says. The six-person review team that once worked full time through exam weeks is gone, and with it the review step that used to hold up grades.
The relief reaches the people running the exams too. "As a testing center it works really well. We experience fewer startup problems, the IT colleagues are positive, and there are fewer complaints from the exam rooms," Lucas says. Even colleagues who were wary of digital exams have come round: those who are less technically inclined, and who used to run paper exams, find Schoolyear far less daunting than the proctoring setup it replaced. With fewer disruptions across the board, the testing center gets to do more of what it values most, which is going unnoticed by students.
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