College exams move online

BOCA RATON, FL - As the number of college students taking courses online grows exponentially some progressive schools are offering their students the opportunity to take exams online. According to Jarrod Morgan, co-founder and vice president of ProctorU, Inc., which claims to be the leading provider of webcam based, proctored online exam services, it’s natural for a student who takes his or her courses online to expect tests and exams to also be available online.

Morgan, whose company provides live online exam proctoring for about twenty colleges and universities, said the service was originally developed for internal use by Andrew Jackson University, an online institution in Birmingham, Alabama. “AJU students were complaining of the inconvenience and high cost of locating a proctor and traveling to the proctor’s location for their final exams,” he said. “So the school, where I was director of technology, decided to develop an online exam proctoring system in early 2008 to accommodate its students,” Morgan related.

The online proctoring service was a hit with students, who paid about $30 for the service – according to Morgan far less than testing centers charged – and by the end of 2008 almost every student was taking all their finals online supervised by the university’s live proctors via webcams.

After discussing their success with online proctoring at an education industry conference Andrew Jackson University was approached by several schools who asked if the proctoring service could be made available to them. The university then decided to commercialize the service and spun it off into a separate corporation, ProctorU, Inc.

“Our students absolutely love the online exam proctors and the convenience the service offers,” stated Tammy Kassner, director of admissions at Andrew Jackson University. “They might be intimidated a bit taking their first exam online as an exam is critical to the computation of their grade for the course. But when they see how professional and helpful the proctors are they relax. They even look forward to their next exam,” she commented.

“Several other companies offer online testing services, but our research indicates these companies burden schools with additional requirements that put the cost of their service out of reach for many students and institutions. Others have technical issues that preclude them from providing their service to students using Macintosh computers. And they all charge far more than we do,” said ProctorU board member Joseph Schmoke. “We like where we’re positioned. We have a real opportunity to be a dominant factor in the fledgling business of online testing, especially in the area of supervising college exams using live certified proctors,” he concluded.

Contact Information

Joseph Schmoke

Founder & Managing Member

University Consultants LLC

Contact via E-mail