Better Assessments
The Proctoring Question: A Practical Guide
Ten principles and two practical tools for choosing, applying and governing proctoring. Download the guide that closes The Proctoring Question series.
20 October, 2026
Ten principles and two practical tools for choosing, applying and governing proctoring. Download the guide that closes The Proctoring Question series.
Every new cheating technology creates pressure to add another layer of surveillance, but that is an arms race the sector cannot win. In this eighth article of The Proctoring Question, we look at why better assessment design may be the most powerful security control, and what that means for the future of proctoring.
A proctoring platform can verify identity, control access and flag suspicious behaviour, but it does not decide what any of that means. People do. In this seventh article of The Proctoring Question, we look at why governance, policy and transparency make a proctoring process defensible, and where the authority of AI should end.
Remote proctoring has opened up assessment to candidates who could never reach a test centre. But getting someone logged in is not the same as giving them a fair chance. Equity begins after login, and it depends on design choices most assessment organisations can control.
Remote proctoring is often presented as the candidate-centric option. But removing the journey to an exam centre does not automatically remove the pressures of sitting the assessment. In this fifth article of The Proctoring Question, we look at why candidate experience belongs alongside security and validity, and how the environment we create can change the evidence an assessment produces.
Everyone wants to know the best way to proctor an exam. There isn’t one. Every qualification carries its own purpose, stakes, candidates and constraints, so the useful question is not which model is best, but which model fits, and whether you can explain why you chose it.
There is no universal definition of secure enough. The answer depends on what the task exposes, what is at stake if the result is wrong, and the scale you are working at. The third article in The Proctoring Question sets out how to match the control to the risk, and what it costs when you get it wrong.
Behind every AI-generated proctoring flag sits a human reviewer making the final call. When the queue grows faster than the team can think, consistency erodes, and with it the defensibility of your outcomes. The second article in The Proctoring Question turns the camera onto the review process itself, and sets out five practical things to get right.
Choice feels inclusive, but choice is not inherently fair. In part one of The Proctoring Question, our series on the future of remote proctoring, we look at why fairness across delivery routes must be designed rather than assumed, and pose six questions every assessment organisation should answer frankly.
Remote proctoring began as an emergency fix. Six years on, it’s a structural part of high-stakes assessment. In this new series we explore eight themes that determine whether remote delivery earns trust, from fairness across channels and reviewer flag fatigue to organised cheating, equity and the role of human judgement in an AI-assisted world.
Answer 12 questions across strategy, delivery, design and data and get a clear, personalised breakdown of where your assessment operation is strong and where to focus next.