Can You Really Trust Online Test Results? Let’s Talk Proctoring.

The definition of proctoring according to the Cambridge Dictionary is “to watch people taking an exam in order to check that they do not cheat.” So proctoring is as old as exams themselves. I’m showing my age perhaps, but all our school and university exams involved sitting in a hall or room (usually stiflingly hot) with a retiree who’d been brought in to watch us scribble away for 2 or 3 hours. I’m not really sure how effective they were if you really wanted to cheat. At that time, cheating involved writing things on your arm or on bits of paper hidden in your pencil case. Not me, of course….

The New Age of Testing

The bar keeps being lifted higher for these school and college exams – in an environment where AI is challenging our whole approach to learning, and what knowledge is still important.

For pre-hiring testing, things have always been a bit more relaxed – and typically any assessments were conducted at the premises of the prospective employer. COVID and remote working have changed all that. Consider these issues for any online test or assessment you’re having completed remotely:

• Is the person who completes the assessment the one you’re considering hiring? Or did they get their smart friend to sit it for them?
• Did they receive help from friends, co-workers, or houseguests?
• Did they use Google or AI?
• How long did they spend on the assessment?
  

We’ve had reports of candidates spending 12+ hours on Excel assessments that should take less than 30 minutes. Unless you know they spent 12 hours, your decision based on the result might very well be the wrong one.

How We Spot Cheating (and Why It’s Rare)

Proctoring aside, at Accountests we can generally tell when someone tries to cheat one of our tests using Google or AI – because their question success rate is very high, but they can’t finish a high number of questions. We actually see very little of this – we’d hope the ethical bar of accountants is quite high!

Proctoring Options: From DIY to Built-In

Proctoring online tests can be as simple as having a candidate complete the test while on Teams or Zoom. You can watch them. But you or someone on your team needs to be available, so it’s time-consuming and a bit clunky. Having proctoring built into the testing process makes this much easier, as you don’t need to be present — so long as you get a report on the candidate’s activity and can check that the person you see taking the test is the person you’ve seen at the interview or screening.

As a hiring manager, it’s important to consider both why you should proctor and what to be mindful of. Here are a few reasons proctoring any pre-hire assessment process is important:

1. Accuracy: You want to choose the best candidate. That’s pretty simple, really, but if your criteria include considering the result of any testing, it needs to give you accurate data.
   
   
2. Fairness: You want candidates to be confident your process is fair. That’s hard with open-ended assessments or ones not tied closely to the job description.
   
   
3. Legal robustness: If your process is not robust, it could be subject to legal challenge.
   
   
4. Security: You don’t want candidates sharing the test content with other candidates.
   

Proctoring also brings with it a responsibility to protect the privacy of the candidate, to store any proctoring images securely, and to explain to the candidate how you’re doing this.

Integrity in a Changing World

Cheating has always been around — the tools just keep changing. From calculators to ChatGPT, the challenge is the same: knowing you can trust the results you see.

Proctoring helps you protect the integrity of your testing process and gives both you and your candidates confidence that the results are fair. 

Curious how it works? Try a proctored Accountests assessment or get in touch to see how simple and secure it can be.