Premier business school selects Inspera’s complete ecosystem to enhance academic integrity and student experience at scale.

Inspera is delighted to announce its first client in India: Great Lakes Institute of Management (GLIM), one of the country’s premier private business schools. This milestone partnership represents a significant expansion into one of the world’s fastest-growing higher education markets and highlights the increasing importance of secure, scalable digital assessment solutions in modern academia.

The Indian Context: Digital Assessment at Unprecedented Scale

India’s higher education landscape is undergoing a dramatic transformation. With a university population already exceeding 40 million students and a national target to increase the Gross Enrolment Ratio from less than 30% currently, to 50% by 20351, the country faces the challenge of accommodating an additional 50 million students, a scale that cannot be met through traditional campus expansion alone.

In response to rising demand, the Indian University Grants Commission (UGC) now allows universities with sufficient quality scores to offer fully online degrees. This major policy shift, which adds to an already rich education landscape consisting of private providers, alongside SWAYAM, and its television counterpart SWAYAM Prabha, is creating a major opportunity for digital assessment solutions. As institutions across the country launch or scale these online and distance provisions, one of their steps has been to turn to global leaders for guidance on implementing best practices.

The University of London, one of Inspera’s largest clients and a pioneer in large-scale digital assessment2, has been working with Indian institutions and regulators, including Indira Gandhi National Open University, and the National Assessment and Accreditation Council, to support the move to large-scale Online Education. With approximately 110,000 candidates across 190 countries and nearly 100,000 exams annually running on the Inspera platform, the University of London’s experience offers valuable insights into approaches for managing and assuring assessments for Indian institutions navigating similar challenges.

As Dr. Amrane-Cooper of the University of London noted: “India has an astonishing pedigree in delivering higher education at scale—there’s much we can learn from each other.”3

About Great Lakes Institute of Management

Founded in 2004 by Padma Shri Awardee Dr. Bala V Balachandran, GLIM operates two campuses: its main campus in Chennai with approximately 1,050 students, and another in Gurgaon with around 850 students. Inspera will initially serve the Chennai campus, with plans to hopefully expand to Gurgaon in the coming months.

Strategic Drivers: A Strategic Vision for Modern Assessment

GLIM’s decision to adopt Inspera reflects a comprehensive strategic vision. The institution identified several key imperatives driving their transition to Inspera:

Digital Transformation: Embracing advanced digital and online assessment methods that offer flexibility, ensure integrity, and develop future-ready skills.

Student-Centric Flexibility: Providing students with a modern digital assessment experience on campus that offers consistency, reliability, and flexibility, significantly increasing student satisfaction and engagement.

Academic Integrity in the AI Era: Like any other business school, GLIM faces mounting challenges around plagiarism and the rising use of AI tools for assignments and assessments. While they had a separate tool for plagiarism detection, GLIM sought a solution from a single provider where academic integrity capabilities were fully integrated with the assessment platform. This integration enables seamless workflows and more effective detection and prevention of academic dishonesty while maintaining rigorous, knowledge-based testing standards.

The Challenge: Navigating a Fragmented Assessment Landscape

Before Inspera, GLIM’s digital assessment infrastructure was fragmented across five to six separate tools: two for assessment delivery, two for proctoring, another for plagiarism detection, plus additional integrations with their Learning Management System. This disparate approach created inefficiencies, complicated workflows, and compromised the user experience for both faculty and students.

Why Inspera? A Complete Ecosystem in One Platform

GLIM chose to implement Inspera’s entire solution suite including assessment, proctoring, originality checking, and locked browser making them the first Indian institution to adopt Inspera. Several distinctive features drove this decision:

1. One-Provider Digital Assessment Solution

Rather than toggling between multiple disconnected tools, GLIM now works with a single provider, giving faculty a platform where they can compose assessments, administer exams, grade responses, review proctoring data and videos, and access all related information in one place.

2. Offline Resilience: A Game-Changer

GLIM’s Chennai campus, located slightly outside city limits, frequently experiences internet connectivity issues. Inspera’s offline resilience capability was transformative. The system continues functioning normally even during internet disruptions, with proctoring running seamlessly in the background. This feature directly addresses usability, accessibility, and location constraints that can compromise exam security and student experience.

3. Code Compilation Question Types

As a business school teaching programming, data analysis, and financial modeling, GLIM required specialised question types for code compilation and Excel-based exercises, capabilities they couldn’t find on other platforms available in India.

4. Inspera Originality: Rigorous Testing, Proven Results

GLIM conducted thorough testing of Inspera Originality and found it met their exacting standards for detecting both plagiarism and AI-generated content. Given the sharp rise in AI tool usage among Indian students and the need for management to make high-stakes decisions about students’ academic futures based on exam results, robust originality checking was non-negotiable. Inspera also enables faculty to create multiple test paper versions, ensuring fair and challenging examinations.

5. Advanced Proctoring with Screen Recording

Because business school students frequently switch between assessment tools and Excel during exams, GLIM requires comprehensive screen recording that triggers alerts when students open unpermitted applications. Inspera’s proctoring solution provides this extra security layer for both high-stakes exams and lower-stakes internal assessments like quizzes and assignments.

6. Locked Browser

This advanced security feature locks students’ test screens, prevents opening of new browser tabs or windows, blocks copy-paste functions, and restricts keyboard shortcuts and finger swipes, providing GLIM with complete confidence in exam security.

7. Flexible Question Types

GLIM conducts a broad spectrum of exams requiring multiple-choice questions, open-ended responses, equations, calculations, and more. Inspera’s rich repository of question types accommodates this diversity required for business school examinations.

8. Data Privacy and Security

With cybersecurity threats and information misuse increasingly common, GLIM prioritised protecting exam integrity and student data through secure encryption, regular security updates, comprehensive audit trails, and strict access controls.

Moving Forward

With the agreement signed, GLIM’s onboarding process is underway, with the first assessments scheduled for early February. 

A Partnership Built on Shared Values

This collaboration represents more than a technology deployment, it’s a meeting of institutional missions centered on student success, academic excellence, and innovation.

As Vimala V M, HoD – Centralised Academic Administration at Great Lakes Institute of Management states: “One of the most important strategic priorities for us is to ensure a robust, future-oriented assessment model that upholds academic integrity and enables student success. Inspera offers a comprehensive solution in a secure environment that aligns with our core values of excellence and innovation, while supporting our broader objective of preparing the next generation of future-ready business leaders through high quality technology-enabled learning.”

Anthony Brockley, Chief Revenue Officer of Inspera, highlights the significance of this partnership “Entering India through our partnership with Great Lakes Institute of Management is tremendously exciting. As India works to accommodate 50 million additional students by 2035, the need for secure, scalable, and integrated digital assessment has never been greater. We’re honoured to support GLIM’s leadership in this transformation.”

Looking Ahead: The Future of Digital Assessment in India

As India’s higher education sector continues its rapid digital transformation, the need for secure, scalable, and comprehensive assessment solutions will only grow. Inspera’s entry into the Indian market, backed by proven success with institutions like the University of London, positions both Inspera and forward-thinking institutions like GLIM to lead this evolution.

Inspera’s solutions are available to Indian institutions through its reseller partner, Edutech, which specialises in bringing world-class educational technology to the Indian market.

By adopting Inspera’s complete ecosystem, GLIM is investing in a future where technology empowers rather than constrains academic excellence, where students can demonstrate their knowledge flexibly and authentically, where faculty can focus on teaching rather than managing disparate tools, and where academic integrity is maintained through sophisticated yet user-friendly solutions.

……………………..

References

  1. Changing perceptions about online and distance learning: the Indian experience
  2. https://www.linkedin.com/posts/lamranecooper_really-enjoyed-the-opportunity-to-discuss-activity-7366040564707774464-r1HK
  3. https://www.linkedin.com/posts/university-of-london_highereducation-onlinelearning-distanceeducation-activity-7344379612593893377-BgGZ/

Learn More

Read more about how the University of London delivers nearly 100,000 exams annually with Inspera here.

For more information about Inspera’s digital assessment solutions, contact us or book a demo.