Why Proctoring is More Expensive than LMS

Our customers often ask: what is the difference between an LMS and a proctoring system? Why is it necessary to invest more money in proctoring compared to a distance-learning system? Our new material answers these questions.

LMS stands for remote learning management systems which are currently used by many educational institutions and corporations. They are often compared to a virtual classroom where students or staff can be trained all over the world. It’s possible to load almost unlimited volumes of educational courses and tests into an LMS and analyze the statistics. Such a system automatically generates reports on the users’ progress — in real time, it tracks the number of people who have studied a certain course, their score, and mistakes they made.

Many customers believe the proctoring system is some minor addition to their LMS and cannot understand why monitoring students is more expensive than the LMS itself. However, LMS and online proctoring are technologies with completely different tasks. Let's see what constitutes the final cost of proctoring.

Minimizing risks

LMS has many useful features, but it is not able to establish how fair the users are in their test-taking. Accordingly, it is impossible to determine the real academic performance of the audience and to make an objective evaluation of their knowledge level. This brings forth several risks:

1. The students who systematically cheat on exams have less knowledge and may become poor professionals;

2. Those employees who do not possess the necessary expertise and, due to poor control, cheat at passing tests are likely to make mistakes in their work. For companies in the fields of manufacturing, IT, power engineering, chemical industry, etc., this is a double risk: a reckless act of a poorly trained employee can lead to catastrophic consequences.

3. Financial and reputational damage: if some negligent employees make inexcusable mistakes, and the public becomes aware of it, the corporation will be badly hit, since the responsibility for their employees’ actions (and training) lies with them.

Currently, the only guaranteed way to minimize these risks is to use proctoring in exams and testing.

Infrastructure

Proctoring requires recording, processing, and storing hundreds of gigabytes of video and audio data. Examus stores them only in trusted cloud systems with strict security standards: Google Cloud, AWS (Amazon Web Services), Microsoft Cloud, etc. This, of course, costs money.

Additionally, the video recordings are processed and analyzed with the help of highly sensitive artificial intelligence (AI) developed by Examus. We continuously refine and improve its work; recently, we have achieved a 35% increase of accuracy in detecting violations.

Staff

In order to improve the accuracy of detecting violations and to minimize the risk of AI errors, exams are conducted with post-check or real-time observation video by specially trained proctors. For synchronous proctoring, one proctor can simultaneously track from 6 to 9 users, and therefore, in cases where the exams are held through a large customer, a rather impressive staff is required.

Besides, a considerable part of the labor compensation fund goes to the salaries of technical support employees. The standards of work with large clients often require uninterrupted operation. Our technical personnel works in shifts, with technical support available 24/7.

Thus, proctoring systems are more expensive than LMS, since their performance and specific feature of cheat-checking requires an impressive staff of experts as well as data processing and storage costs. However, these costs pay off, as, due to fair exams, only qualified specialists graduate from universities, and companies reduce to a minimum the possible financial and reputational risks that come with incompetent employees.