[Proctoring] Sticky sessions when live proctoring

With our new architecture, once a candidate is assigned to a proctor, the association will become ‘sticky’, meaning that the ProctorExam system will ‘remember’ and ensure that a candidate remains allocated to the same proctor throughout the exam session, even in the event of reconnection (proctor or candidate leaving and rejoining the session).

Important to note

• Each proctor should be logged in with their own unique user account.

• If the same proctor opens more than one proctoring tab, the new tab will take over the currently assigned candidate connections and any existing tabs will become inactive while displaying a warning.

• ‘Maximum candidates to proctor ratio’ is now set in the ‘Proctoring’ settings tab. This value is set at an Institute level, for all proctors. The default value is 6 candidates per proctor, please ensure that you adjust this setting to an appropriate value for your institute. See details below.

Auto Assignment of proctors

• As is currently the case, when candidates start their exam setup, they will be automatically assigned and connected to an available proctor.
  
  Note: Proctors that have any candidate pre-assigned to them (even in the future) are not available for auto-assignment.
  
  

• Once a candidate is connected to a proctor (the candidate is visible in the proctoring page), this candidate will remain with the same proctor unless one of the following events occurs:

  • The candidates finishes the exam by clicking the ‘Finish Exam’ button within the ProctorExam tab.

  • The exam is ended by a call to the End Exam API.

  • The proctor logs out of the proctoring page by clicking on the log out icon.

In the event that the candidate closes the ProctorExam tab or experiences a disconnection before finishing the exam, the inactive candidate panel will remain in the proctor view. When the candidates re-enter the exam room then they will be reconnected to the same proctor and all video streams will resume.

Correspondingly, if the proctor refreshes the proctoring page then after reload of the page, proctoring will continue with the same set of candidates. Should the proctor close the proctor page, any candidates who have not finished their exam will remain assigned to that proctor and will not be monitored while the proctor is offline. If the proctor re-enters the proctor page then the previously assigned set of candidates will be reconnected to the same proctor.

Releasing candidates upon proctor log out

In the case where a proctor no longer wishes to participate in the currently running exam sessions, the proctor can log out of the proctoring page by clicking on the log out icon on the top right of the page. This will un-assign all candidates assigned to this proctor and those candidates will be evenly reassigned across the remaining proctors still online. This functionality can be used to rebalance the workload between proctors during different phases of the exam.  Please ensure that there are sufficient proctors online to match the maximum candidates to proctor ratio. 

Setting the maximum (auto assigned) candidates to proctor ratio

• It was previously possible for each individual proctor to adjust the maximum number of candidates to be displayed in the proctor view. This option has been removed as we will later be adding support to explicitly pre-assign proctors as well as support to re-assign proctors in a future Live Proctoring dashboard.

• As an substitute, the institute settings page now contains a new “Proctoring” settings tab specifically for live proctoring related settings. Here the maximum candidates to proctor ratio can be configured. The default value will be set to 6 candidates per proctor but can be set in the range from 1 to 13 candidates. Note that this setting applies at institute level and applies to all proctors who are associated with the currently selected institute.

General notes

• Proctors with the GlobalProctor role will only be assigned candidates of exams where global proctoring is enabled while proctors with the LocalProctor role will only be assigned candidates of exams where global proctoring is disabled.