Medical and dental exams are often high stakes and healthcare education providers naturally want to do everything they can to ensure exam integrity. The Maxexam Active Invigilation Module (AIM) has been introduced to help them achieve this for remote exams.
How does invigilation (proctoring) benefit remote exams?
Ensuring qualifications are as robust as possible is vital for healthcare examining organisations. After all the candidates sitting and passing these exams are our future doctors, dentists and nurses.
In the past this has been achieved by examining students in a hall with one or more physical invigilators checking candidates aren’t cheating.
Covid-19 changed all that. Healthcare educators still need to be able to examine students, but government and organisation restrictions have meant that it is often no longer possible to do this in a single physical location such as a hall.
Invigilating (or to use the American term proctoring) an exam helps preserve the integrity of an exam by identifying cheats or better still, deterring them. Once exams are held remotely, invigilation becomes a challenge and hence Maxinity has been innovating to help examining organisations secure the integrity of their remote exams held in people’s homes, workplaces etc. Our focus has been to provide a solution to help our clients to invigilate exams without someone physically being in the room with the candidate.
Introducing AIM – Maxinity’s bespoke Active Invigilation Module
Maxexam’s Active App Invigilator (AAI) is part of AIM and is integrated within the Maxexam Exam App. When enabled it actively monitors the behaviour of candidates during the exam using video and audio in combination with artificial intelligence techniques to identify and flag suspicious behaviour. It can be used in conjunction with live invigilators (with responsibility for a group of candidates) to draw attention in real time to questionable behaviour, or post examination to flag suspicious behaviour and provide evidence to support it.
This enables the limited resources of exam boards to be used optimally.
Advantages of AIM
- Identify suspicious behaviour quickly and easily and track where it occurred within the exam.
- A robust system – it continues working even if the internet fails, collecting the information and uploading it after the exam.
- Integration within the Maxexam Exam App means it works in combination with the cheat protection measures already incorporated within the app.
- It can be use alongside live invigilators or post exam.
- It has been designed to minimise network bandwidth, allowing it to run on even the most limited internet connection.
- It can be used in parallel with a second view (e.g., a Zoom call running alongside it) to boost exam security even further.
Conclusion
Exams have had to change with the arrival of Covid-19 and even once the pandemic is over it is likely that some exams will not go back to being physically held in one location.
Maxinity’s Active Invigilation Module, used in combination with the security and cheat detection features always incorporated in the Maxexam Exam App, helps to reduce candidates’ ability to cheat in an exam and get away with it. This in turn gives examining boards confidence that the integrity of their exam is protected and hopefully leads to a reputation that deters future candidates from considering cheating… which is what everyone really wants!
