Convenience rules.
Offer it to the members of your professional association and you give them one more satisfying reason to keep renewing their membership.
That’s why more and more associations are offering their members the convenience of taking online exams in the environment of their choice.
Online exams are a win-win
This flexibility of location delivers a win-win to your members and association. Now, members no longer have to travel to a location to take a test, whether it’s for licensing, certification, or continuing education credit. As a result, they eliminate all the logistical juggling of job and family responsibilities that travel entails.
Your association benefits from remote exams
Your association also wins in three big ways. First, you eliminate or reduce the costs of the following:
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Rental or maintenance of a physical exam space
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Recruitment and coordination of human proctors
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Production of physical exam materials
A bigger market to tap into
Second, remote exams enable your association to offer its accreditations to a wider geographic market. As a result, professionals who did not join your association due to travel limitations become more open to being recruited.
Reduce your carbon footprint
Third, offering online exams allows you to reduce the carbon footprint of travel, exam materials, and the test facility. It’s a step in the right direction to achieve your environmental goals.
Protect the value of your accreditations
To take full advantage of the convenience of online exams, you’ll need to secure the integrity of your exam sessions. Organizations that hire your members believe that these professionals do indeed have the skills represented by their certifications. Without this belief, your certifications will lose credibility in the world ⎯ a loss that would threaten the livelihood of all your members.
That’s where an online proctoring service (aka remote exam proctoring) can offer you a cost-effective, easy-to-use tool to protect the value and credibility of your accreditations.
What is an online proctoring service?
An online exam proctoring service aims to prevent and detect fraud during remote exams by using specialized software or a trained proctor ⎯ sometimes both ⎯ to monitor what the test-taker is doing in real time.
In an exam session proctored remotely, there are two key stages:
Member authentication
Often, a webcam registers the face of the member and compares it with their identification document (e.g., driver’s permit) to confirm that the member is indeed the person who is supposed to be taking the test.
Test-taking
During the exam session, the online proctoring service monitors the member’s computer to ensure that the exam rules are respected. These can include, but are not limited to: no electronic devices, no external resources, no unauthorized apps, and no external help.
Given the easy availability of AI-enabled tools, it’s important that your online proctoring service monitor for and expose AI plug-ins. Given the right provider, these monitoring features require no software installations or a change in the user’s settings.
This proctoring can be carried out by the following:
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A trained person watching the webcam feed
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A recording. After the test, the recording by the proctoring software is analyzed by a human with or without the help of artificial intelligence that has previously flagged suspicious activity.
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Automated exam proctoring. The recorded test session is analyzed by algorithms to flag suspicious activity.
Because online proctoring services offer variations and hybrids of these levels of service, in choosing a provider your professional association should first define its needs.
High-stakes testing
Professional associations are generally credentialing members with skill sets that are critical to the well-being of people (e.g., first-responders, medical personnel, pilots) or the safety of assets (e.g., people in financial products and services, engineering, and architecture).
Given the high stakes of these certifications, the ideal proctoring solution will combine technology and human oversight to make decisions about suspicious activity.
While purely AI-driven proctoring offers time-saving advantages in low-stakes, high-volume testing, trained human proctors can exercise their experience and ethical judgment to eliminate the false positives and bias that may come with exclusively AI-driven proctoring.
Data security and privacy are top of mind
Among test-takers and administrators, data security and privacy are recurring concerns. For example, you may ask:
What information is being recorded?
A typical webcam scan of the room in which the test-taker sits collects a wide range of information about the person, e.g., socio-economic class, political and religious beliefs, and so on.
Some of this information may be classified as sensitive by legal standards, and thus must be handled according to the conditions of that law. Does your service provider take these laws into account?
Who has access to the collected data?
You may be surprised by the number of people who can view the data collected on your test-taker:
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The proctor reviewing the test session
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An administrator invited to review suspicious behavior
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A technician asked to take care of a technical glitch during the exam session
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Third parties invited to support the service provider
It’s crucial to have your service provider define who has access to your data.
Exactly how long will the data be kept?
Each online proctoring service provider sets their storage limits. The less time data is stored, the less risk there is of a breach. Find out your service provider’s policies on storage.
Is the data securely stored?
Remember, should there be a data breach, the reputation of your association is at stake. Ensure that your prospective provider complies with globally recognized standards of data privacy and security.
Once you’ve ensured that your provider checks all the boxes, share this information with your test-taking members. By communicating in a clear and timely way, you’ll help diffuse their concerns about data privacy and security.
If you’d like to find out which online proctoring solution best serves your association and how it can be implemented to maintain the credibility of your accreditations, we’d be happy to help.
