Safe Exam Browser Server Screen Proctoring Service
Congratulations to Tobias Halbherr, Tony Moser, Kristina Isacson, Nadim Ritter, Andreas Hefti, Daniel Schneider and Damian Büchel on winning the ITS Innovation Award 2025!
Introduction
Digital examinations involve special requirements on the legally sound documentation and traceability of individual examination sessions. Where there are complaints, appeals or technical problems, it is especially important to ensure complete transparency and traceability. Until now, digital examinations on ETH-owned computers have relied on a commercial solution originally developed to detect insider threats in the financial sector. However, this solution does not meet the data protection requirements for use on student devices used under the Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) policy. In addition, this solution lacks features that provide specific benefits for examinations. Moreover, it also lacks integration with the Safe Exam Browser (SEB), Moodle and ETH Zurich’s digital examination ecosystem built on the ETH Academic Applications used to support teaching.
In this context, the EduIT division of ETH IT Services developed the data protection-compliant SEB Server Screen Proctoring Service (SEB SPS). This service records the individual examination sessions as a sequence of screenshots and stores relevant metadata, such as the third-party application currently being used or the URL accessed in the SEB browser window. As part of the SEB ecosystem, the SEB SPS is directly integrated into the Moodle examination environment. This integration enables granular permission management and supports efficient, user-friendly workflows. This gives the examiners greater autonomy, while significantly reducing the support workload for EduIT.
EduIT has developed the SEB SPS features specifically for examinations, thereby significantly expanding the technical foundation for new, pedagogically innovative digital examination formats. These include cheat-resistant open-internet examinations and examinations involving web-based chatbots.
A wide range of stakeholders benefit from the SEB-Server Screen Proctoring Service: Students and lecturers from all departments, EduIT, IT Services (ITS), Academic Services, the Unit for Teaching and Learning (UTL) and the Rectorate. Furthermore, the benefits are not limited to ETH Zurich; thanks to the widespread adoption of the SEB ecosystem – with well over 10 million direct SEB downloads per year – universities and educational institutions worldwide also benefit.
The Safe Exam Browser ecosystem
The Safe Exam Browser (SEB) is a versatile ecosystem of modular tools that enable the secure conduct of computer-based examinations. This ecosystem includes SEB clients for Windows, macOS and iOS, which are used in conjunction with a web-based learning management system (LMS) or an e-assessment system. In addition, optional components such as the SEB Verificator app and the SEB Server with the SEB Server Screen Proctoring Service can be used to further enhance functionality and security.
The products of the SEB ecosystem are available as freeware. They temporarily turn any computer into a protected assessment tool. By controlling access to system functions, external websites and applications, they prevent the use of unauthorised resources and communication channels during examinations.
SEB is open source, licensed under the Mozilla Public License, developed at ETH Zurich and financed by the SEB Alliance together with ETH Zurich, ensuring its continued development and broad usability.
SEB Server Screen Proctoring Service
The SEB Server Screen Proctoring Service is an optional component of the SEB ecosystem. It creates a record of each individual examination session in the form of regular screenshots, independent of the underlying examination system (e.g. Moodle). The recordings can be viewed in real time or with a time delay using a media player. For this purpose, a detailed view or an n-by-n tiled multi-view is available, allowing multiple examinations to be displayed simultaneously. In addition, the screenshot metadata can be sorted using a browse function and searched using a search function. Both functions can be limited to individual examination attempts or extended to entire examinations. It is therefore possible, for example, to display all screenshots in which a specific URL was accessed across all candidates.
The independent recording of individual examination sessions in the form of screenshots and metadata significantly improves the traceability of individual examination sessions. This improved traceability of digital examinations offers significant benefits in four areas: First, greater legal certainty in appeal proceedings and the documentation and verification of attempts to cheat on the examination device; second, the possibility of reconstructing examination work lost due to technical incidents or user errors; third, simplified analysis and debugging of technical incidents during examinations; and fourth, the design of open but cheat-resistant digital examination formats.
In all four cases, the data recorded by screen proctoring is not analysed in isolation, but together with other relevant available data, such as the actual examination data in Moodle and/or event logs from the exam invigilators and on-site technical support. The triangulation of the various event data makes it possible to cross-validate the different data sources, enabling a more accurate and reliable reconstruction of the events. The screenshots also enhance transparency and lend credibility. For example, a student once filed a complaint stating that the answers recorded in Moodle were not the ones she had entered. In the examination, the students had to enter numerical answers to several consecutive questions. For the student in question, the same numerical value had been stored for every question. The student argued that she had only entered this value once and that there had clearly been a technical error. Rather than arguing that such an error was technically implausible or impossible, we were able to simply consult the screen recording and compare it with the data recorded in Moodle. The recording clearly showed, even to laypeople, that the same value had in fact been entered several times – it even showed a correction when she mistyped a decimal place in a later task – and the timestamps in the screen recording also matched those in Moodle exactly. The screen recording provided transparency and the case could be resolved with little effort and before it escalated into legal action.
Conversely, students’ work may, for example, fail to be saved or may be deleted due to technical incidents or user errors. In such cases, the independent screen recording enables the reconstruction of lost work. This can happen, for example, if students do not save their files in the designated work folder. As a result, the backup loop that is normally in place does not save the work at regular intervals. Another example is that students accidentally delete the file containing their work, overwrite it with an empty file, or forget to upload it to Moodle. In such cases, screen recording enables leniency and the reconstruction of the work, because it has been preserved in the screenshots.
If there are technical complications during a digital examination – for example, if a programming environment repeatedly freezes because an unsuitable examination task consumes too much memory and this was not detected during pre-examination testing – screen proctoring makes two things possible: First, the screen recordings greatly facilitate problem analysis and the identification of solutions while the examination is still in progress, thereby significantly increasing the likelihood that the problem can be effectively addressed while the examination is still in progress; this means that the examination can still be completed properly and fairly despite technical problems. Second, in such cases, the examination time lost by the students as a result of the technical complication is recorded by the exam invigilators and credited back to them. This process can be particularly demanding, especially in large examinations. The screen recordings make it possible to verify after the event that the affected students did in fact receive the additional time to which they were entitled.
Although all the types of incidents described above are rare in digital examination practice at ETH, they are nonetheless part of day-to-day service operations, given the large number of digital examinations, with tens of thousands of individual examinations per year. Without screen proctoring, dealing with such cases would be far less satisfactory and more time-consuming for the students and lecturers concerned and for ETH, and some cases would have to remain unresolved altogether.
Finally, the SEB Server Screen Proctoring Service enables the design of open yet appropriately cheat-resistant examination formats such as open-internet examinations. The established operating model of the SEB ecosystem is based on examiners explicitly making available and authorising resources that students are allowed to access during an examination, such as a statistics programme, a specific website, or lecture notes in PDF format. However, there are examination scenarios in which examiners expressly do not want to prescribe which resources students may use. This may be, for example, an examination that involves researching the academic literature. In such cases, SEB Screen Proctoring can be used to design a secure open-internet examination. SEB is configured to allow students free access to the internet. The examiners set out clear rules of conduct for the examination. These generally include a ban on communication with others, in particular on the sharing of examination work. Compliance with the rules of conduct is then ensured by real-time monitoring of students in the SEB Server Screen Proctoring Service, supported by traditional on-site examination invigilation in the examination room. The browse and search functions tailored to the examination format are particularly important in this context, as they enable efficient monitoring of compliance with the agreed rules of conduct during an examination. These open yet secure examination setups enable fundamentally new, authentic examination formats that are more closely aligned with disciplinary and research practice and offer considerable potential in the context of project-based teaching and advanced courses.
SEB Server Screen Proctoring in practice
SEB SPS is already in regular use at ETH and other universities. Cheat-resistant open-internet examinations with SEB SPS have already been successfully piloted at ETH. Initially, SEB SPS was not yet able to support all of EduIT’s examination formats (e.g. Linux examinations). The remaining changes were successfully completed in 2025, meaning that all examination formats are now covered by the Digital Examinations service.
The SEB developers at EduIT are funded by the SEB Alliance and ETH Zurich. SEB SPS delivers considerable operational savings. These include, in particular, the elimination of licence costs for the commercial solution and a substantial reduction in EduIT’s examination support workload during examination periods. Operating the on-prem server and storage infrastructure for SEB SPS is cost-neutral compared to the commercial solution.
ITS Innovation Award
ITS staff can nominate themselves or other ITS staff members as candidates. Individuals or even entire teams can apply or be nominated. An innovative idea must involve a clear innovation that has not previously been implemented or envisaged in this form within ITS or at ETH. (Extract from the rules and regulations)
The first ITS Innovation Award was presented by Director Dr Rui Brandao at the ITS staff briefing event on 2 July 2018.
