Online Proctoring: How Does it Work from the Technology Side?

In previous parts, we defined what is online proctoring technology in general. Now it’s time to dig deeper into the tech side of it, using the Examus AI solution as an example for online proctoring.

The online proctoring technologies usually include the following modules:
· Workplace compliance inspection module
· Photographing and identification module
· Cyber-proctoring module
· Data storing and proctoring session post-verification module
· Control panel module

Workplace compliance inspection module

The workplace compliance inspection module is an important part of the online proctoring platform. At the initial stage, the module checks that the camera and microphone are connected and that images and sound are accessible from both devices.
To ensure that the app can record and transmit video to the server, the module starts broadcasting the video as if it were a real examination. If the module is not able to start the broadcasting process, the student won’t be able to start the examination.
A successful broadcasting attempt, however, is not always enough. The quality of the transmitted video may be unacceptable, and the broadcast itself is often interrupted. Therefore, the module checks the quality of the network connection.

Module for photographing and identification

The photographing and identification module is responsible for obtaining, processing, and storing in the database reference images of a person, as well as images of user documents, until the end of the user’s examination session (including receiving a grade for the exam) or for any other period agreed upon by the customer.
The Examus proctoring system uses a neural network to recognize the student’s face. For automatic identification, the user must take a reference photo, which will subsequently be used by the cyber identification module during the exam to confirm the identity of the user, as well as for the second and subsequent entries into the exam with proctoring

Cyber-proctoring module

The cyber proctor module consists of five large blocks:

· Audio cyber - responsible for recognizing voice signals in a broadcasted audio stream;
· Face-cyber - responsible for reading the facial vector and recognition of gaze direction, face identification in the frame, and the presence of more than one face in the frame;
· Cyber-identification - responsible for determining the substitution of the examinee;
· Cyber desktop - responsible for controlling the user's screen and fixing the change in the state of the screen;
· Cyber-search of the same person - responsible for finding a person who passes the same exam using different accounts, one of the types of fraud in the system when an excellent student passes the exam several times: for example, one time for himself and four extra times for four of his friends;

Face cyber is based on a neural network (Artificial Intelligence) that recognizes a face by the face-vector: eyes, mouth, and nose. The AI online proctoring neural network is trained on a database consisting of thousands of different photographs of people's faces. The neural network recognizes the same face even with glasses, a beard, long hair, or even a different hairstyle.

Audio cyber uses libraries for recognizing human voices among mixed audio streams. When a voice is detected, the system automatically captures the violation and sends an alert to the control panel. Afterwards, all the violations during the exam are saved to a report with ratings for each student according to the number of alerts they got from the cyber-proctor.

Cyber identification remembers the face of the user who went through the stage of photographing before the exam, writes a reference photo to the database, and during the exam periodically compares the face in the frame and the reference photo. In the event of a face change, a violation is automatically recorded.

Cyber desktop uses libraries for frame-by-frame comparison of desktop images; in the presence of more than 10% of changes, an automatic violation is recorded, which is transmitted for confirmation to the human proctor control panel.

A cyber search of the same face captures each photo of the face at the stage of photographing, then considers the face vector, and the photo is searched in the database of matches by the face vector. In case of matches, information about all is transmitted to the report and sent to the customer.

Data storing and proctoring session post-verification module

This is the module for storing data and post-verification of proctoring sessions (archive). It contains video files of users (camera and desktop), as well as all violations recorded by the cyber and the human proctor.
All information about messages and session violations can be downloaded to a PDF file.
Also in this module information is displayed the automatic assessment of the session on the “traffic light” scale: green - completed, yellow - attention, red – cheater.
Violations are also displayed on the video timeline in the form of a color indication: the yellow part indicates violations and the red part indicates more than 3 violations per minute.

Control panel module

The control panel module allows the customer to work independently with the proctoring system. Online proctoring is working from a browser with no additional installations needed.

Depending on access rights, the following operations are possible:
· creating exams;
· creation of system users: students, proctors, offline proctors, system administrators;
· creating a schedule in the calendar;
· viewing exams statistics for a day/week;
· viewing status and managing students during the exam online;
· recording proctors for online sessions;
· report generation for all sessions, including statistical reports (how many violators were there, which violation was the most frequent, how many people passed the exam more than once, the scope of automatic assessment results, etc.).

In this blog post, we introduced you to the various modules of the Examus online proctoring solution.

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