Before a student could answer the first question, there was another examination to pass. Show your identification. Show your surroundings. Confirm that the person in the chair belongs to the name on the screen. In Queen’s University’s published Examity instructions, authentication could take ten minutes. The exam clock had not even started.
Those ten minutes explain the company rather well. Online education made teaching portable. Testing carried an awkward piece of furniture along with it: the invigilator’s desk. Examity’s job was to decide what could replace that desk when the student was somewhere else entirely.
- The service: identity checks, automated monitoring, human supervision and exam recordings.
- The buyers: universities, employers and certification programs.
- The turn: acquired by Meazure Learning in 2023; university notices later documented moves to ProctorU.
The room moved. The doubts stayed.
Michael London had previously run Bloomberg Institute, which developed a financial-knowledge assessment. He told EdSurge that experience inspired Examity, founded in 2013. Co-founder Shailu Tipparaju brought the technology background. Their opportunity sat between two promises: take the test from wherever you are, and convince someone else that the result deserves to count.
Examity supplied the supervision around an assessment. It could authenticate a candidate, observe the session, record activity and report irregularities. A university still needed its course and exam; a certification body still needed its credential. Examity occupied the checkpoint between the person taking the test and the organization accepting the score.
The audience grew beyond college courses. In April 2019, the company named Penn State, Texas A&M and Western Governors University among its higher-education customers, alongside employers and certification providers including Amazon and MongoDB. It reported more than 500 organizational customers and forecast more than two million exams that year.
Attention, sold by the exam
Examity’s useful distinction was its menu. Software could monitor a recording. An auditor could review it. A human could authenticate someone at the beginning, or supervise throughout. The institution could choose how much attention an assessment warranted. That flexibility was its pitch in a market that also included Proctorio, Respondus and, then, ProctorU.
A small quiz and a professional qualifying exam have different consequences. Spending the same amount supervising both makes little sense. Examity’s 2022 overview put the principle plainly: “one size does not fit all.” Its expertise lay in coordinating authentication, monitoring, support and review into different service levels.
The economics were equally concrete. Wichita State’s October 2021 notice listed automated standard at $3.75 per test and automated premium, including human audit, at $5.75. Live premium cost $12 for the first hour and $5 for each additional hour. Those were contract-specific historical prices.
Who paid mattered too. Northwestern’s published student schedule listed $18.75 for one hour and $32.75 for three, with extra charges for late scheduling. Arizona’s nursing resource page said university funding covered licensing. The same convenience could arrive as an institutional service or another student expense. Examity historically offered per-test purchasing and annual subscriptions.
Then everyone needed a proctor
Investors had already noticed. University Ventures and Inherent Group put in $21 million in 2017. Great Hill Partners invested $90 million in 2019, with expansion and research into machine learning and biometrics among the stated uses. Jim Holm became CEO in 2020; London moved to chairman.
Then classrooms closed. A business designed for distance faced a shortage of human capacity. Indiana University’s April 2020 guidance said live proctoring was unavailable for newly transitioned courses. Only automated premium and record-and-review options were available for those finals, with setup potentially taking two to three weeks.
That is the revealing failure point. Being available online did not make the service infinitely available. People still had to review recordings, help candidates and manage sessions. In the emergency transition, the bottleneck appeared before an exam could begin. A useful lesson for anyone buying such a service: test the staffing plan alongside the technology.
The exam could travel instantly. The capacity to supervise it could not.
The camera sees a room. People see a life.
The home brought its own complications. Queen’s instructions described showing the surroundings by rotating a computer or using a mirror. Its teaching toolkit also listed possible proctor connection problems and limits on simultaneous scheduling. Barton Community College required a laptop or desktop, a working camera and microphone, and adequate upload and download speeds.
These requirements turn “anywhere” into a conditional promise. A shared room, an unsuitable device or an unreliable connection can undermine the arrangement. Institutions need accommodations, a technical rehearsal and a workable alternative. A student’s ability to produce a quiet room is a different thing from mastery of the subject.
Interpretation matters just as much. Indiana’s guidance described software flagging behavior, followed by proctors reviewing flags and removing false positives before reporting to faculty. The recording supplied something to examine. Academic judgment still required context. Buyers can copy the useful separation here: detection, review and a decision each deserve explicit responsibility.
A rival becomes the destination
Meazure Learning completed its acquisition of Examity on September 1, 2023. Its announcement emphasized broader services, geographic reach and combined technology. A former competitor, ProctorU, now belonged to the same operation. Consolidation offered a larger platform, while leaving customers with the practical work of changing systems.
By February 2025, Middle Tennessee State University told faculty Examity had been discontinued and described its ProctorU transition. The notice asked instructors to wait for the D2L integration if they could. Even the replacement needed time to settle into the course workflow.
For a candidate today, the sensible starting point is the institution’s current instructions. For a buyer, Examity’s history leaves a sharper question than whether software can watch an exam: how much supervision does this assessment deserve, who will interpret it, and who absorbs the cost?