The challenge: securing exams with Word and Excel on student-owned devices
ROC van Twente has been committed to a BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) setup for years. Around 90% of its programs have students bringing their own laptop to school, which creates enormous flexibility. But for exams that require specific desktop applications, such as writing exams in Word or business administration exams that require students to work in Word and Excel alongside a browser, the institution had relied on a different solution: exam accounts.
An exam account is essentially a stripped-down Windows account on a device managed by the school, tied to a unique username and password. "You just create a unique user, and they get a stripped-down Windows version with controlled internet access," says Harmen Frans Talstra, Advisor Educational Technology & IT at ROC van Twente. On the surface, it works. But the limitations are significant.
Exam accounts can only be rolled out on managed school devices, where students do not have admin access. That means this method does not scale to BYOD. Every time these exams run, the school needs enough managed computers to seat every student. That is a capacity ceiling that only gets harder to manage as digital exams grow.
“We want to work exclusively with personal accounts and no longer with these unique usernames. Exam accounts come with a real security risk and it’s also difficult to manage”
Harmen Frans Talstra — Advisor Educational Technology & IT at ROC van Twente
Security is another concern. Exam accounts are shared credentials, not personal logins, which creates a potential backdoor into institutional systems and conflicts with compliance standards. Old accounts that are not properly closed, or accounts whose ownership is unclear, introduce risks that personal logins do not. "We actually want to work exclusively with personal accounts and no longer with these unique usernames. There is a real security risk and it’s also difficult to manage,” Harmen Frans says.
The challenge was clear: conduct exams with applications such as Word and Excel without using exam accounts. Schoolyear offered the solution.
The solution: Schoolyear Secure Apps
The vocational exams for business administration programs, developed by the awarding body SPL (Stichting Praktijkleren), require multiple desktop applications. "Students have to go to Exact Online, visit the SPL exam site, open and fill in an Excel file, then write a report about it in Word, all in a secured session, without access to AI or outside resources," Harmen Frans explains. “That exam, which many other institutions struggle with, is running smoothly now because of Schoolyear.”
“Students have to go to Exact Online, visit the SPL exam site, open and fill in an Excel file, then write a report about it in Word, all in a secured session, without access to AI or outside resources.”
Harmen Frans Talstra — Advisor Educational Technology & IT at ROC van Twente
Securing desktop applications like Word and Excel on student-owned devices is fundamentally different from securing a web-based exam. On BYOD devices, students are the administrator of their own laptop. That means institutions cannot enforce the system-level restrictions that work in managed computer labs: blocking local files, disabling AI add-ins, or restricting internet access inside applications. Schoolyear solves this by not running the applications on the student's device at all. Instead, Word and Excel run in an isolated environment. The student's laptop only functions as a display.
"Schoolyear is flexible. Students use their own laptop and we can just test at any moment, in any classroom we want, which is great," Harmen Frans says.
Implementation: preparation is key
Rolling out Schoolyear across a large, multi-college institution with a BYOD policy takes preparation. The most important lesson Harmen Frans has for other institutions is simple: do not start with a real exam.
"Prepare, prepare, prepare. I cannot emphasize this enough. Do not just start with a real test or exam," he says. "As IT, you really need to take on this project together with the education side. Figure out how it works together, with a class of students during a pilot." Running a pilot first surfaces potential device issues, login problems and configuration questions before they can disrupt an actual exam.
ROC van Twente even built a small onboarding game for students to walk them through the steps at the start of the year. Students check whether their laptop meets requirements, confirm their Wi-Fi connection, verify their updates are in order, and install Schoolyear. "With that game, they walk through all the steps in a playful way," Harmen Frans says. It is now being rolled out across programs at the start of each new school year.
Getting that student preparation right matters, because the responsibility for arriving with a working device cannot sit entirely with IT. "We are going to be stricter," Harmen Frans explains. "Students need to make sure they bring the right laptop. They cannot just show up on exam day with an incompatible device.” The institution maintains a small pool of backup laptops for genuine emergencies, but the expectation is that students come prepared.
The result: Word and Excel exams on any device, without AI access
For ROC van Twente, the direction is clear. Exam accounts are on their way out. The institution is moving toward a setup where all exams, including Word and Excel exams, run on student-owned devices through Schoolyear.
The flexibility that comes with that is hard to overstate for a large institution spread across multiple locations. Exams no longer need to happen in designated computer rooms on managed hardware. They can run in any classroom, at any time. That is the vision ROC van Twente has been working toward, and Schoolyear's Secure Apps is what makes the most demanding exams in that setup possible.
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