Lesson 03: Quality Assurance

• What is quality assurance and how does it relate to proctoring?
• What are the guidelines for a quality and successful online proctoring system competencies are required for reliable proctoring?  

These are the questions that we'll address in this learning activity. What is your understanding of quality in proctoring? Watch the video below to compare&contrast.

Quality assurance refers to the policies, processes and actions through which the quality of a system is developed and maintained.

It can be difficult to really know what is happening behind the screens when it comes to online proctoring. Quality assurance of examinations and assessments carves a window into the user experience, stakeholder behavior, seeing the bigger picture, quality assurance (QA) check, support issues and personal data collection.

The User Experience: Gain valuable insight into your proctor, administrator, and test-taker experiences by monitoring the entire remote testing process. By stepping into their shoes, you truly know whether your policies and procedures flow just the way you planned them to—smoothly. Does what you expect to see line up with what the auditors see?

Stakeholder Behavior: Everyone needs at least some level of confidence in the integrity of their proctors, test administrators, and exam participants. That’s hard enough when test takers are all right in front of you, let alone remote. Auditing remote test administrations is the best way to confirm no one is subverting your rules and your policies are keeping your tests secure.

See the bigger picture: When you conduct quality assurance for exams delivered remotely, you’ll be able to view a bigger picture, gathering both the high-level and granular information necessary to validate that your test security policies and procedures are working as planned.

QA check: Don’t let your security policies become irrelevant. Conduct a QA check on your remote testing program to gain actionable feedback on what is working well (and not so well). 

Support team: You always need to make sure that the OP program supplier has a well-trained support team and associated processes and systems in place, to help to exam candidates if they run into problems. Does your potential supplier have a proven track record of providing great candidate support and do they have references who will attest to this? It is also important to say that much as suppliers can mitigate risks associated with their own software, they do not have control over all parts of the service, and events such as full internet outages, although infrequent, have to be properly managed.

Personal data collection: Highly sensitive biometric data can be collected and stored on the pretext of verification purposes. Hence, personal data collected during OP system operations need to be carefully identified, classified, and labeled according to its sensitivity level for storage to maintain its confidentiality, integrity, and availability; irrespective of the medium of storage.