Customer Story
By unifying secure online proctoring, intuitive grading rubrics, and streamlined workflows, UNITAR, a Malaysian institution, has successfully transitioned from fragmented legacy systems to a standardised, future-proof assessment model with Inspera.
Prior to adopting Inspera, the university’s assessment ecosystem was heavily siloed. Final examinations were conducted on one platform, coursework assessments were managed through an internal learning platform, and traditional paper-based exams were held on campus.
“Students would take questions from an internal portal. We would give them about three hours depending on the examination type, and they had to submit via the portal itself. We also had invigilators on duty to observe the students when they performed the final assessment. We also used the traditional method where students had to come to campus and sit for paper-based examinations. However, that was difficult because we have a large number of online students all over Malaysia, so we had to set up exam centers in various locations. It was very difficult in the past before we knew about the Inspera Assessment platform.”
With a rapidly growing online student population dispersed across Malaysia and several international locations, this fragmented approach created massive inconsistencies for both students and academic staff.
The logistical burden of traditional testing was unsustainable. To accommodate distance learners, the university had to coordinate and establish physical exam centers in various remote locations across the country. Additionally, the institution faced strict quality assurance audits, meaning they urgently needed an online assessment solution that complied with national regulatory and accreditation standards.
To maintain the absolute validity of their examinations regardless of student location, the university’s Project Management Office sought a secure, scalable, and user-friendly online assessment and proctoring platform.
“With students located throughout Malaysia and in several other countries, we needed a secure online assessment and proctoring platform that could maintain the integrity of examinations regardless of where students were taking them. As a higher education institution, we must comply with regulatory and accreditation requirements, where examination security is a key area of focus during quality assurance and audit processes.
Our priority was to ensure that assessments were reliable, valid, and conducted in a secure environment while providing a consistent experience for all students. These were the main drivers behind our decision to explore and procure a new assessment solution.”
Inspera stood out as the ideal partner. It offered a single, unified environment that could seamlessly support large, geographically dispersed student cohorts while guaranteeing exam security. For the academic team, the platform’s intuitive interface and powerful grading tools promised to turn a historically laborious administrative task into a smooth, consolidated workflow.
“From an academic perspective, what stood out after Inspera was selected was its ability to provide a secure, scalable, and user-friendly assessment platform.
It offered the functionality we needed to support a large and geographically dispersed student population while maintaining assessment integrity. The platform also integrated well with our assessment processes, was intuitive for both students and academic staff, and provided the security and reliability required for high-stakes examinations. These strengths made it well suited to our institutional needs.”
To ensure a seamless transition, the university executed a phased rollout supported by a robust change management strategy:
The transition has fundamentally changed how the university designs, delivers, and grades assessments.
For the Faculty of Education, where essay-based assessments are the norm, Inspera has radically simplified the grading process. Academics can now design questions, establish answer schemes, and embed detailed rubrics directly into the platform.
“I use rubrics, which I can put into Inspera; it makes it easy for me to just click on the rubrics and have the marks appear. It really helps when handling about 500 students at a time, making the grading process much smoother.”
Initial hesitation among the faculty has evolved into widespread acceptance and trust. Even mathematics lecturers, who traditionally rely on complex notation, have found designing and grading assessments on Inspera to be highly efficient due to in-platform support. For the students, taking exams digitally has quickly become second nature.
Following the resounding success of the pilot and initial rollout, the university has expanded Inspera’s usage over the last two years. The platform now supports:
To stay ahead of the rapidly evolving academic landscape, the university is also exploring the integration of Inspera Originality for advanced AI and similarity detection to further support academic integrity.
“Moving from traditional assessment methods to Inspera has been the right way forward to support online learning. This ensures exams are reliable and valid, ensuring our students achieve their learning outcomes and helping us produce quality, highly employable graduates.”
We are excited to continue our partnership with UNITAR.
