Evaluating an assessment integrity platform is not the same exercise it was five years ago. The category has split between lockdown-style proctoring tools and evidence-based platforms, and the two are not interchangeable. This guide is for the higher-ed IT directors, academic integrity officers, and procurement teams who have to evaluate that decision and defend it afterward.

Four areas separate a platform that will hold up under scrutiny from one that will generate tickets, appeals, and headaches: compliance, student experience, evidence quality, and integration.

Start with compliance, not features

Feature lists are easy to compare and easy to game. Compliance posture is harder to fake and matters more. Ask every vendor for their current SOC 2 report, not a promise that one is coming. Ask whether they have a completed HECVAT (the Higher Education Community Vendor Assessment Toolkit), since most procurement offices will require one anyway and a vendor without one is behind before the conversation starts.

On student data specifically, be precise about language. No vendor can truthfully claim blanket "FERPA compliance," because FERPA compliance is ultimately the institution's obligation, not the vendor's. What you want instead is a vendor that is designed to support FERPA-compliant institutional use, typically by operating under the school official exception, with clear documentation of how student data is used, stored, and deleted. Review that documentation directly rather than taking a badge on a marketing page at face value. Nigel's own posture on this is laid out on the Trust Center.

Student experience determines adoption

A platform that technically works but that students hate creates a second problem on top of the first. Ask vendors directly: does this require a lockdown browser or a desktop install, or does it run in the student's normal browser? Does it disable accessibility tools, screen readers, or assistive devices? What happens on a Chromebook?

Push further on consent. Does the student know, at every moment, what is being captured? A visible, persistent indicator of active capture is a meaningfully different experience than monitoring that runs silently in the background. That difference shows up directly in complaint volume, appeal rates, and how much of your disability services office's time gets consumed by proctoring software rather than actual accommodations work.

Evidence quality is what protects you in an appeal

Every flagging system will occasionally flag something that turns out to be nothing. What determines whether that is a five-minute review or a drawn-out conduct case is the quality of the evidence behind the flag. A bare suspicion score, with no visual context and no way to see what actually happened, is nearly impossible to defend in a hearing and nearly impossible for a student to contest fairly.

Look for platforms where every flag ships with the underlying evidence: a timestamped video frame, a confidence indicator, and enough context for a reviewer to make a real judgment call. Ask whether flags are ever acted on automatically, or whether every consequential decision goes through a human reviewer. Automatic suspension or automatic failure on an algorithmic score is one of the clearest predictors of a due-process complaint down the line. Nigel's approach to this is covered in detail on the AI detection page.

Integration determines your rollout timeline

A platform that requires a separate login, a new account, or a parallel workflow outside your LMS will always have lower adoption and higher support load than one that launches directly from Canvas, Blackboard, Moodle, or D2L through LTI. Ask for a specific, documented rollout timeline from a comparable institution, not a generic "a few weeks" estimate.

Also ask what runs on the student's machine. A lightweight browser extension is a much smaller ask of your security team than a desktop application requiring elevated permissions, and it is usually the difference between a routine security review and a prolonged one.

Questions to ask every vendor

  • Can you share a current SOC 2 report and completed HECVAT?
  • Does the student take the exam in a normal browser, or does the platform require a lockdown browser or desktop install?
  • Is every flag reviewed by a human before any consequence is applied?
  • What evidence accompanies a flag: a score alone, or a timestamped visual record?
  • How does the platform integrate with our LMS, and what does a typical rollout look like?
  • What happens to captured data after the term ends?

Where to go from here

Most institutions evaluating this category are really deciding between two philosophies: control the machine, or verify the environment with consent and evidence. If you want to see how the second approach works end to end, from LMS launch to a documented human decision, start with how Nigel works, or go straight to Nigel for higher education for a breakdown built specifically for academic integrity offices.