Securing Online High-Stakes Certification Exams

What sets high-stakes exams apart

A professional or degree-granting certification puts the issuing body's credibility on the line: every result must be legally defensible, not merely technically reliable. The difference rests less on technology than on the quality of the file you can produce six months later.

What that file actually contains

In Educati, a session leaves behind a named seating plan — which candidate sat where — the list of designated invigilators, the issued convocation, the session report, and the papers tied to each student. Added to that is a timestamped audit log of sensitive changes — grade edits, exports, permission grants — exportable as CSV. That is what documents who altered a mark, and when.

What it does not contain

There is no video recording, no tab-switch log, and no log of plain reads: the audit log keeps changes, exports and permission grants, not the fact that someone opened a page. Nor is there end-to-end encryption in the cryptographic sense: access is governed by roles, which is a different claim, and storage-encryption guarantees belong to the hosting arrangement — get them in the contract rather than assume them. Stating otherwise in exam regulations would expose the body the day a candidate asks to see the item in question.

The appeals procedure

On appeal, the body reconstructs events from these elements: convocation, assigned seat, invigilators, session report, submitted paper and audit log. That is a documentary chain a review board can act on — in practice sturdier than a video recording whose retention is itself contestable.