WSU hopes to keep students honest online

Washington State University announced this week it has contracted with the Massachusetts-based proctoring service Examity to monitor the school's online test-takers, a collaboration that began last week.

Assistant Vice President for WSU's Global Campus Rebecca Van de Vord said the university requires proctoring for as many as 18,000 exams a year, and that number is expected to grow by 20 percent over the next seven years. She said the roughly 3,000 students enrolled in the Global Campus will be affected as well as a smaller proportion of Pullman-based students who are taking online courses.

"There are always questions about online programs as to 'How do you know the person taking the course or doing the work is the person who's enrolled?' " Van de Vord said. "The best way to determine that is through a proctored exam or activity where they show their ID and you see their face and they complete the work while someone is watching them."

Examity Founder and CEO Michael London said the service uses a combination of human monitoring and artificial intelligence to provide a range of options within the service. He said instructors could choose to use a fully automated proctoring service, a human who would watch the test taker through a camera in real time or something in between.

"This thing that they bought gives them the flexibility to be able to do any and all of those things and pick and choose what's most appropriate on a test by test basis," London said.

Previously, Van de Vord said online students would have to physically go to a place where a WSU-vetted proctor could sign in for the student and monitor them as they took the test. As technology advanced, she said it became possible to monitor students over greater distances. Van de Vord said for the last several years, WSU monitored online test-takers through a proctoring center based in Pullman. However, she said, with WSU enrollment numbers on an upward trajectory, this became less and less effective.

"We didn't have the capacity in that space - either physically or with the technology - to continue to meet the growing enrollments in the online courses," Van de Vord said.

Van de Vord said the new service will be paid for entirely by the $18-per-exam fees online students have always paid. She said the school selected Examity for a variety of reasons but mentioned she was most impressed by their customer service and the options available to instructors regarding just how automated the proctoring process for each exam should be.

London said while the range of options Examity offers has always been a competitive advantage, he said another thing that sets the company apart is their emphasis on user experience. Moving forward, London said Examity is well prepared to accommodate whatever volume of test-takers WSU asks of them.

"We could be doing 500 people in an hour and then we could be doing one person in a month," London said. "It doesn't really matter to us, we're just there and available and partnering in a way that's going to be good for the administration, faculty and the test-takers."

Scott Jackson can be reached at (208) 883-4636, or by email to sjackson@dnews.com.