Why ExamLense
Four choices that shaped the product
Each of these costs us something: a simpler product, a bigger contract, an easier sales conversation. They are here because the alternative fails the institutions we built this for.
Built for the conditions the exams actually run in
ExamLense was designed around the constraints real candidates sit under rather than apologising for them afterwards. That started with our own market and it holds anywhere a connection is unreliable or a device is shared.
- The countdown and the answer state both live on the server, so a dropped connection pauses a candidate instead of ending them
- The Lite tier exists partly because it is the tier a constrained campus can actually run
- Prepaid credits in the invoicing flow institutions already use, settled by bank transfer or mobile money
- Support that overlaps your exam window, not somebody else's working day
Evidence that still means something a year later
A proctoring decision is only worth as much as the record behind it. When a candidate appeals, or a regulator asks, the answer has to be reconstructable.
- The audit log is append only. Reviewer decisions, administrator actions, and result changes are written once and never edited or deleted
- Exam rules are versioned objects, and the version in force is stamped onto every session. A rules version that has been used is never mutated
- The evidence timeline puts each flag beside the moment it happened, so a decision can be re-examined rather than just re-asserted
- Monthly exports are written to storage that cannot be altered after the fact
The platform flags. A person decides.
Automated proctoring that accuses students on its own is how institutions end up in the news. Detection here is an input to a human judgement, and the separation is enforced in the product, not just in the policy.
- Risk scores promote a session into a review queue. They never produce a verdict
- A trained reviewer dismisses, confirms, or escalates, and the reasoning is recorded with the evidence
- High-stakes exams can require two reviewers to agree before a violation stands
- A failed identity match goes to manual review rather than hard blocking an honest candidate
- Reviewers cannot change exams, rules, or licences. Administrators cannot overturn a review decision
Buy only the surveillance the exam justifies
Most proctoring is sold as a single maximum setting. That is expensive, it is disproportionate for a weekly quiz, and it creates a media archive somebody then has to protect.
- Three tiers, so a low-stakes assessment is not recorded like a licensing examination
- On the Lite tier, snapshots are analysed and deleted immediately. No biometric media is retained
- Media is never public and never passes through the API. It is reached only through short-lived signed URLs
- Retention is a setting, and deletion actually happens on it
In practice
What those choices look like day to day
Bring us a hard case
A disputed result, a campus with bad connectivity, an exam board that needs to explain itself to a regulator. Those are the conversations we want.