Distance Education
ProctorU is an online proctoring service that allows students to complete a test off-campus while ensuring the integrity of the exam for the institution. This ProctorU Faculty Handout provides details of this service.
Instructors need to provide testing information to ProctorU so that students may schedule and take the exam. This information should be provided to ProctorU at least two weeks in advance of the exam open date using this Assessment Directive Form. The sooner information is provided to ProctorU, the sooner an exam can be posted in the scheduling system for students.
ProctorU provides 24/7 proctoring services and live technical support. Students register for and take their exam from the SOU ProctorU Portal at http://www.proctoru.com/
ProctorU is one of several proctoring options available to students. Detailed information is available for students in the "Scheduling a Proctored Exam" section of our web page "Taking an Online Course." We recommend that instructors provide information about various exam options (Medford, locating a proctor via the NCTA site, or ProctorU) by linking to that page in their Moodle course site. You may also wish to share the ProctorU Student Handout as part of your course documents.
Tips for Managing Proctored Exams
Requiring a proctored exam adds a layer of complexity to your course management, but it can go a long way to preserve academic integrity, as students have to offer proof of identity and take your exam under a qualified proctor's watchful eyes. The following tips may help you manage this process:
- Midterms make for better proctoring candidates than final exams. The stakes are lower and there is more time available in case students encounter difficulties and have to reschedule.
- Choose an easy-to-remember but not easy-to-guess password for your exam. You'll provide the password to each proctor prior to the open exam period.
- You're better off specifying a particular exam for proctoring rather than allowing students to choose from two or three different exams. It's complex enough to track one test!
- Include information about the proctored exam in your syllabus and post information at the top of your Moodle course site regarding students' options for taking the test. Provide a link to this related article for students posted in the Moodle knowledgebase.
- Be sure to provide test information early to ProctorU in order to facilitate student sign-ups -- they cannot register for an exam until you have scheduled it with ProctorU. Your test doesn't have to be ready until the exam open date; you just have to know when it will be available to students.
- For an online test, set your exam up so that students see no more than their score while the exam is still open. After it has closed, you may wish to allow them access to their responses so they can see which questions they missed and which were correct. For major exams like midterms and finals, we do not recommend displaying answers at any point unless you intend to retire all of the questions in the exam and never use them again.