ESL examination board revokes diplomas after problem with proctoring software

Over the past few months, the examination board of Erasmus School of Law (ESL) has revoked a number of diplomas after a review of images recorded via proctoring software revealed technical issues during an examination. This was reported on Thursday afternoon by the Dutch broadcaster NOS.

This issue affected ESL students who had to sit examinations at home due to the Covid crisis. The university uses online proctoring software supplied by the company ProctorExam. Last July, the students experienced a technical problem during an online exam. They themselves were unaware of this problem or assumed it had been resolved after they got in touch with a helpdesk.

Close to 100 exams

It took until last week – two months after the exam in question – before the students were told that something had gone wrong, writes NOS. All in all, the issue affected close to 100 exams. Due to this technical fault, the examination board is unable to check whether the students had committed fraud during the exam. For this reason, the results of this exam were invalidated. However, the students had already been marked for it and in some cases have even been awarded a diploma – based in part on this mark.

The examination board says that evaluating the recordings took so long because the company ProctorExam waited very long with forwarding them to ESL. ProctorExam makes an initial selection, dividing the recordings into students who may have cheated and those who haven’t done anything suspicious. The possible cases of fraud are subsequently evaluated by the examination board. ProctorExam did not have any comments for NOS about this case.