The Next-Gen Proctoring Solution, Enhancing the Quality of Education: Examus

“Our mission is to help universities, enterprises, government agencies, developing countries implement the process of online education and make it secure and effective.”

Examus is an AI-based platform providing online proctoring solutions. It serves clients in an array of spheres, including banking, retail, IT, industrial enterprises, online education platforms, and HR. Currently, the company is active in 17 countries, monitoring 300, 000 exams per month on average.

Examus was founded in 2015 and is based in San Francisco, California.

The Silicon Review reached out to Dmitriy Istomin, CEO of Examus, who spoke about how the company is making a difference in this segment and leading the pack from the front. Below is an excerpt.

Head to Head with Dmitriy Istomin, CEO

Q. What’s your story? And tell us what motivated you to establish Examus.

Examus was born in 2015 as a single-person initiative. At that time, there was an issue of ensuring the entry of online education to the academic community as credit courses. Universities and other educational institutions could make content for online courses and tests, but no monitoring instrument helped to make sure that online exams were passed honestly. Having done the research, we found out specific requirements for our market and created a system that meets its demand. During the last six years, we have been working not only within our local market but also in the Middle East, LATAM. In addition, in 2018, Examus was brought up in SkyDeck Berkeley accelerator, the USA.

Examus is a globally operating but closely-knit team of IT innovation enthusiasts looking out to change the ethos of e-learning by improving the integrity of the online assessment. Our mission is to help universities, enterprises, government agencies, developing countries implement the process of online education and make it secure and effective.

Q. Trust is one of the most important currencies of leadership that requires authenticity and consistency to maintain. What’s your take on this?

Indeed, trust is one of the invariable points in our work. We are striving for both students and universities to trust IT services and the proctoring system developers. However, everything that has to do with the trust issue is a rather complicated question, because students are anxious about the safeness of their data and how decisions are made about their behavior during the evaluation process.

Universities are also concerned about whether we store and process the personal data correctly so that they will not be sued and there will be neither financial nor reputational expenses in the long run. It is a moment of paramount priority because we always pay attention to security first. For instance, we revise the settings to meet the cybersecurity and data privacy requirements for every customer. To do so, we flexibly customize workflow on how the system responds to specific needs depending on the regional exams characteristics.

Q. Where does Examus stand at the moment relative to other participants in the industry?

When we just set up Examus, there was the opportunity to implement a high-quality solution to countries seeking a cost-effective proctoring tool. In this day and time, we can undoubtedly state that our technical solution keeps up with EdTech market leaders. We have developed a unique AI-based tool that is focused on face identification, a measure of users’ attention and engagement during online exams, tests, and other types of online interaction. Examus AI proctoring can adapt into any learning management system and can be deployed in any public or private cloud or customer’s infrastructure in a fast enough time. The most popular proctoring companies provide a service, nevertheless, they are not flexible enough in terms of placing the infrastructure and selling all software for managing exams with proctoring and proctors. The true advantage of our solution is that we customize the system to the needs of every customer and allow getting high-quality, cost-effective proctoring tools.

At these times, we are working in several markets where people are unaware of what proctoring is. We carry out market education and realize that it is a long sales cycle. That is what we enjoy the most. We ensure the entry of proctoring technology and methodology not only as one more solution in the market but also as a new approach to online education. That is the key advantage over other competitors.

Q. How do artificial intelligence and computer vision technologies improve your solutions? And how do these solutions help universities and companies advance their e-learning outcomes?

In this day and time, the AI methods for analyzing student behavior when using online exams are technically well-developed. All AI technologies that are now developing through the training of neural networks require an array of resources. In our case, we are striving for our solution to be cost-effective. That is why, in the current set, AI can detect some events but is still not sufficiently developed to make the final decision. Therefore, our approach cannot reject exam results based on AI only. To do this, it needs to be double-checked by a person, which is the basic industry standard.

Examus solution uses artificial intelligence and computer vision to detect test-takers’ absence or the presence of non-authorized strangers, recognize emotions and voice prompts, spots destructions from the screen, attempts to use forbidden devices (self-phones, headphones, etc.). The positive impact of Examus Proctoring lies primarily in the fact that using our product education cannot be interrupted even in unforeseen situations when face-to-face exams are impossible. For instance, over the last year, we helped our users to conduct more than 500 000+ exams that involved 700 000+ test-takers. As a result, these people could proceed with the educational process despite complete lockdown. It is almost impossible to befool our AI technology as it is being improved all the time. It helps us maintain educational equity for all users. The practice shows that, due to Examus Proctoring, learners’ outcomes become better, and students themselves get self-sufficiency during the online assessment. By the end of every evaluation or testing, companies receive a list that contains conducted test results. These results show cheating attempts detected by the system. This data helps to understand the test-taker better and track progress or regression in the acquired knowledge.

Needless to say, our key task is to provide proctoring services with the brand-newest features as efficiently and cost-effectively as possible. The core point of the development is partnerships, such as technology and business partnerships. Possibly, we could integrate into the ecosystem of some large companies.

Q. What can you tell us about Proctor AI and Examus EQ?

We provide facial recognition to identify a person, measure attention and engagement during online courses, lectures, and other types of online interaction. Based on this technology, we have built two products: Proctor AI identifies students and monitors the assessment process; Examus EQ collects data about learners’ reactions during online lectures and webinars.

Examus EQ was born in 2018 to help people in their education journey and solve the main issue of distant learning - lack of feedback from teachers and students. Despite some restrictions, such as a necessity to turn on the webcam, that withhold our product from the wide distribution, many customers still value Examus tools higher.

Studies show that our technologies help significantly improve learning outcomes and get fair results. Using Proctor AI and Examus EQ, the lecturers can now make their content more efficient. We are currently carrying out some research on how the Examus EQ can be applied methodologically. Due to the pandemic, the need to deliver education remotely was boosted. We get plenty of queries about proctoring solutions that keep us focused on online exams.

Get in touch:- examus.com

“Our key task is to provide proctoring services with the brand-newest features as efficiently and cost-effectively as possible. The core point of the development is partnerships, such as technology and business partnerships. Possibly, we could integrate into the ecosystem of some large companies.”