Whether you represent an institution looking for a proctoring solution backed by students or you want to read reviews about SMOWL before using it, this article is for you.
Below, we share the recent experience of a postgraduate student. Her testimony may be of interest to both institutions looking for proctoring tools with real references and those who want to know what their first exam with SMOWL will be like.
When asked about SMOWL, this Master’s in User Experience Design student rated the experience as positive.
She also offered her vision on the present and future of digital education and proctoring technologies, which we share with our community in this article.
From her general perception of distance education to the emergence of AI in the educational landscape, the article culminates with the story of her personal experience.
The trusted solution of prestigious universities
More and more educational institutions are choosing SMOWL to guarantee the integrity of their digital assessments and protect their reputation against academic fraud in the age of AI.
The International University of La Rioja (UNIR), based in Spain, is one of the more than 350 institutions that trust our digital proctoring tool to supervise their online exams.
The continued collaboration with this university supports our position as a trusted solution for higher education. However, on this occasion, we will focus on the student perspective.
Protecting user privacy
Testimonials from those who use SMOWL provide valuable information, as they confirm, among other aspects, the non-invasive nature of our tool. Precisely because user privacy is a priority for us, we have anonymized the data of the interviewed participant, in accordance with her request.
Online education as a synonym for savings and flexibility
When asked about the reasons that led her to choose an online master’s degree over an in-person one, the UNIR student highlighted mainly economic and flexibility reasons.
“The master’s degree I wanted to take was only available at private universities. In the case of in-person ones, in addition to tuition fees, there were also accommodation and travel expenses. Taking the master’s degree remotely allowed me to save those costs and be able to balance my studies with my daily life without any problem.”
Had the online modality not existed, she stated that she would have considered taking it in-person or looking at other programs that fit her interests.
Fortunately, the offer of online master’s degrees allowed her to continue expanding her training in the desired field without needing to move to another city or assume additional transportation or housing expenses.
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Advantages and disadvantages
Although online education offers numerous advantages, among which work-life balance and the possibility of accessing pre-recorded classes at the most convenient time stand out, it also presents certain drawbacks.
Among them, the UNIR student mentioned the difficulty of establishing relationships with other classmates, considering “face-to-face communication much more beneficial.” However, the growing popularity of distance programs shows that their benefits far outweigh their disadvantages.
Quality, regardless of the modality
Exclusively digital universities, as well as those that have incorporated online teaching into their academic offering, have shown that the online modality does not imply a reduction in educational quality.
In this sense, the participant declared that “the modality does not affect the quality of education, but rather the resources offered by the university, the professors, the updating of the syllabus, and the interest of it.”
The future of distance education
Although the pandemic acted as a catalyst for distance education, this modality responds to a broader trend of digitalization. Therefore, it can be understood as a natural evolution of the educational system that, sooner or later, would have ended up consolidating.
In this context, the interviewee pointed toward a hybrid model in which “in-person education will be maintained, especially for undergraduate degrees, while the distance offer for postgraduate degrees increases.”
New training directions
There are many cases of people who, as they advance in their studies, identify degrees with high labor demand or discover new interests and decide to steer their career in a specific direction. That was also the case for our interviewee.
“I enrolled in this master’s degree to expand my knowledge and be able to learn,” she explained, “but also for employability reasons. I studied computer engineering, but I ended up becoming more interested in the design side, and this master’s degree seemed like a good way to reorient my career.”
Limits on artificial intelligence
AI has raised concerns in educational centers and universities around the world due to its ability to perform complete exercises and solve exam questions in a matter of seconds.
In response, some institutions have chosen to completely prohibit its use. Others, like UNIR, “understand it as one more tool that students should know how to use,” while many are still defining how to face the risks it poses to academic integrity.
At UNIR, professors “ask students to write a section explaining the uses that have been made of AI in specific assignments,” the student commented. In this way, they can incorporate the support tools that they find most useful for preparing their work.
The interviewee stated that she uses AI to better understand the content, create outlines, and organize notes. Among the available platforms, she cited NotebookLM and ChatGPT as the most useful.
Artificial intelligence also presents risks for exams, both in in-person and remote universities, where proctoring plays a fundamental role.
With SMOWL, institutions like UNIR can block the exam browser window or monitor students’ computer activity to detect the use of unauthorized AI tools, among many other functionalities.
Proctoring as a key gear of online education
The consolidation of online education would not have been possible without mechanisms capable of guaranteeing academic integrity. With the rise of artificial intelligence, the risks associated with fraud have increased, making proctoring a necessity.
However, since it is a relatively recent technology, institutions continue to ask themselves questions such as: Will proctoring be well received by students? Will it cause technical problems? Does it invade privacy?
Similarly, those who face an exam supervised with proctoring for the first time often wonder what the experience will be like with this type of tool.
Will there be false positives? Will it affect the development of the exam? Will it be easy to install? These are some of the most common doubts before taking an exam with SMOWL. To answer these questions, we have the direct testimony of our interviewee.
The SMOWL online proctored exam experience
The participant, who had never taken a proctored exam before, described her experience with SMOWL as positive.
“I was a bit nervous at first that SMOWL would be hard to use or cause problems during the exam, but it was actually very straightforward and not invasive at all. I also liked the fact that I only had to install it once.”
How do students view proctoring?
It is common for students to feel concerned about taking a proctored exam, particularly when they lack prior experience with this type of software.
Among the concerns, the UNIR student highlighted the fear of feeling observed and the uncertainty regarding possible technical issues. In addition, she pointed out that many students show some resistance to installing and configuring new programs due to the additional effort they perceive it entails.
Even considering that “the perception has not changed much” yet, she also observed that students are becoming familiar with proctoring tools, “increasingly common in exams.”
Mock exams, regulations, and best practices
With SMOWL, universities can conduct trial exams* as a first contact with the tool. Likewise, the rules, instructions, and guides provided by educational centers help students get an idea of what their first proctored exam will be like.
“The university offered us information about the rules and how we had to do things,” the interviewee noted. Before using SMOWL, one of her main concerns was that the camera placement could cause the exam to be canceled.
However, once the test was completed, those concerns disappeared. “If I had to give advice to a student who is going to use SMOWL for the first time, I would tell them not to worry, because it is simple and easy to use,” said the student.
Online proctored exam experience: simple and non-invasive with SMOWL
The experience shared by this postgraduate student from the International University of La Rioja, who kindly agreed to provide her testimony, highlights SMOWL’s non-invasive approach and demonstrates how easy it is to complete a proctored exam using our software.
If you represent an educational institution and would like to learn what our clients say about SMOWL, we invite you to read the article linked.
If, on the contrary, you are a student who wants to know more about the experience with our proctoring tool, here you will find an interview with another UNIR student.
*These tests are limited to a certain number of students.
