State-of-the-Art of Commercial Proctoring Systems and Their Use in Academic Online Exams

Introduction

In last few years, online courses and exams have become a more common practise, giving students the opportunity to attend the courses and take exams from places outside the physical classroom (O’Reilly & Creagh, 2015). Educational programs have evolved to provide solutions for students with changing needs, and the widespread adoption of online learning courses by private or public institutions is a further incentive for the development of programs for learning platforms with a reduction of costs for courses and training. Colleges and universities, while adopting these new educational technologies, require a cloud technology called “online proctoring” (O’Reilly & Creagh, 2016). Online proctoring programs (OLPs), sometimes called remote proctoring, generally refer to the digital techniques for monitoring and controlling student activities during an exam through webcams and internet connections (Hylton, 2016), thus preventing and detecting any possibility of malpractice. OLPs record data through an online service for storing and reviewing student behaviours during an exam. Moreover, OLPs usually include functions to authenticate the examinee’s identity to verify that this is the actual person taking the examination (O’Reilly & Creagh, 2015; O’Reilly & Creagh, 2016). OLPs can be broadly classified into the following non-mutually exclusive categories:

• 1.

  Live Proctoring Programs require a person (the proctor) to be in a remote location to control the examinee’s activities like a monitor in real time, ensuring the test-taker’s authentication and preventing any form of unfair actions. If the examinee indulges in malpractice, the proctor can interrupt the exam. Introduced and tested in 2006, live proctoring started expanding on a large-scale in 2008, with a rapid growth of assessments from a few hundred assessed students per month in 2013 to several thousand in 2015 (Shingal, 2020; Foster & Layman, 2013; O’Reilly & Creagh, 2015).

• 2.

  Recorded Proctoring Programs do not make use of a human proctor to control examinee behaviours during the entire exam. The student behaviours are recorded during the examination. Teachers, professors, or people with proctoring functions must review the recorded video and check the presence of possible flags that signal doubt in an examinee’s activities.

• 3.

  Automated Proctoring Programs are currently the most advanced programs available. Examinee behaviours are recorded during the test, and an automated system then reviews the feed through advanced audio-video analysis functions to detect any anomalous or illicit activities (Shingal, 2020).

O’Really and Creagh (2016) also reported a similar categorisation of proctoring programs based more on variations in an interactive approach between the program and user. The authors defined (a) a traditional proctoring approach completely based on human invigilators to detect misconduct; (b) a technology-facilitated proctoring approach in which humans are aided by technological support (e.g. AI support); and (c) an automatic proctoring approach based on the use of pattern recognition functions to detect anomalies through automated procedures.

Nevertheless, this technology has gained a higher relevance because of the COVID-19 pandemic owing to which educational activities in schools and universities have been interrupted during the lockdown. The most problematic issue is guaranteeing that proctoring systems have the same quality level as the educational courses and assessment methods provided before the pandemic, when students could physically attend their courses and exams.