Over the years, I've worked on every side of the enterprise software buying process. I've helped organizations build RFPs, supported vendors responding to them, and participated in software selection from both the buyer's and the supplier's perspective. More recently, I analyzed dozens of online proctoring procurement documents from higher education institutions.
One pattern stood out: the strongest buyer teams rarely ask the longest list of questions, they ask the right ones. A well-designed RFP helps institutions evaluate how vendors address the challenges that matter most, from academic integrity and student experience to accessibility, integration, and long-term sustainability.
When institutions begin evaluating online proctoring platforms, the first version of an RFP often looks similar: a long spreadsheet listing hundreds of features with "Yes/No" columns for vendors to complete.
Unfortunately, those answers rarely make the decision any easier.
Most established vendors will answer "Yes" to many of the same requirements. They support major learning management systems. They offer identity verification. They provide reporting. They use artificial intelligence. They comply with relevant security standards.
The real differences emerge when buying teams ask the next question: How?
These are the questions that reveal how a platform performs in real assessment scenarios rather than on a feature comparison sheet.
Another common challenge is treating every requirement as equally important. In practice, customers usually distinguish between mandatory requirements that every shortlisted vendor must satisfy and evaluation criteria that help identify the solution best aligned with the institution's priorities. That distinction makes vendor comparisons more meaningful and helps procurement committees focus on the capabilities that have the greatest operational impact.
This article brings together twelve requirement areas that consistently appear in online proctoring procurements. For each one, I'll explain why it matters, which questions to ask, and what evidence to request before making a decision.
Identity verification sits at the foundation of every online assessment. If an institution cannot confidently confirm who is taking the exam, the reliability of every subsequent assessment decision becomes questionable.
Traditionally, identity verification focused on the start of the assessment: checking an ID document, comparing it to the candidate, and allowing the exam to begin. Today, buying teams increasingly distinguish between identity verification and identity assurance — the ability to maintain confidence that the same person remains present throughout the assessment.
When evaluating vendors, consider questions such as:
Evidence to request:
What experienced buyers look for:
Many RFPs now separate identity verification from identity assurance. Verifying who starts the assessment is only part of the process. Increasingly, institutions also evaluate how platforms maintain confidence in the candidate's identity throughout the exam.
Assessment security extends far beyond the question of whether a platform includes a lockdown browser. Every assessment has its own balance between security, usability, accessibility, and operational complexity. A buying process should therefore focus on the risks that need to be mitigated rather than on a particular technical implementation.
For example, protecting assessment content may involve browser restrictions, preventing screen sharing or remote-control software, detecting virtual machines, restricting copy-and-paste, or limiting access to unauthorized resources. Different institutions (and different exams) often require different combinations of these controls.
Questions worth including in your RFP include:
Evidence to request:
What experienced buyers look for:
Asking whether a platform "supports a lockdown browser" rarely tells the whole story. A stronger question is which assessment risks the institution wants to prevent and how the platform addresses each of them.
Artificial intelligence has become one of the most talked-about capabilities in online proctoring, but buyers should look beyond whether a platform "uses AI."
The more important questions are what the AI actually detects, how transparent its decisions are, and how much control institutions retain over the review process.
Most modern platforms monitor a combination of identity events, candidate behavior, environmental changes, browser activity, and technical signals. However, detection alone is only part of the picture. Institutions also need to understand how incidents are classified, what evidence accompanies each flag, and how reviewers can validate or dismiss automated findings.
When building your RFP, consider asking:
Evidence to request:
What experienced buyers look for:
AI should help reviewers make better decisions, not replace them. The strongest procurement processes evaluate how automated detection supports human judgment rather than treating every flag as evidence of misconduct.
While automated monitoring continues to evolve, many institutions still rely on live proctoring for high-stakes assessments, professional certification, oral examinations, and students requiring individual accommodations.
Selecting a live proctoring provider involves much more than confirming that human proctors are available. Staffing models, response procedures, training, service quality, and escalation processes all influence the experience for both students and administrators.
Different institutions may also choose different operating models. Some outsource live proctoring entirely, while others prefer software that enables their own staff to supervise exams.
Questions worth including in your RFP include:
Evidence to request:
What experienced buyers look for:
A low proctor-to-student ratio alone doesn't guarantee a better service. Review the entire operating model, including training, escalation procedures, quality assurance, and support availability.
Monitoring an assessment generates valuable information, but that information only becomes useful when reviewers can interpret it efficiently and consistently. Reporting therefore plays a central role in both day-to-day operations and formal academic integrity investigations.
The best reporting systems bring together recordings, timeline events, browser activity, identity verification, AI-generated incidents, and reviewer notes into a single, coherent workflow. This allows faculty and assessment administrators to understand what happened during an exam without reviewing hours of recordings.
Questions to include in your RFP include:
Evidence to request:
What experienced buyers look for:
A report should reduce review time, not create more work. During demonstrations, ask reviewers to investigate a real assessment while timing how long it takes to reach a confident conclusion.
Even the most capable proctoring platform can become difficult to adopt if it doesn't fit naturally into your existing technology ecosystem. For many colleges and universities, the evaluation process extends well beyond online proctoring itself to include learning management systems, identity providers, assessment platforms, student information systems, and reporting tools.
Successful integrations reduce manual work for instructors and administrators. Students launch assessments from familiar environments, grades flow automatically where appropriate, and assessment reports remain accessible without switching between multiple systems.
Rather than asking whether a vendor "supports Moodle" or "works with Canvas," buying teams should understand how deeply those systems integrate and how easily they can be maintained over time.
Questions to include in your RFP include:
Evidence to request:
What experienced buyers look for:
"Supports our LMS" is only the beginning of the conversation. Ask vendors to demonstrate the complete instructor and student workflow, from creating an assessment to reviewing the final report after the exam.
Accessibility should never be treated as a compliance checkbox completed at the end of the procurement process. It influences every stage of the assessment experience, from identity verification and browser security to navigation, reporting, and technical support.
Students may rely on screen readers, speech recognition, keyboard navigation, extended time, magnification software, or other assistive technologies. At the same time, institutions must preserve assessment integrity without preventing legitimate accommodations.
Modern procurement documents increasingly evaluate accessibility as a combination of technical conformance, operational processes, and student experience.
Questions to include in your RFP include:
Evidence to request:
What experienced buyers look for:
Accessibility and assessment security should be evaluated together. Browser restrictions that improve exam security can unintentionally block legitimate assistive technologies unless both are considered during proctoring vendor selection.
Online proctoring platforms process sensitive information that may include identity documents, photographs, video recordings, audio, screen activity, behavioral events, and assessment results. Customers therefore need a clear understanding of how this information is collected, protected, retained, and eventually deleted.
Privacy requirements vary across countries and institutions, but the underlying procurement questions remain remarkably consistent. Institutions want to understand where their data resides, who can access it, how long it is retained, and which contractual commitments govern its use.
This is also an area where feature comparisons quickly become insufficient. Two platforms may both claim compliance with the same regulations while implementing very different approaches to data governance.
Questions to include in your RFP include:
Evidence to request:
What experienced buyers look for:
Instead of asking whether a vendor is "GDPR compliant," ask how personal data moves through the platform, from collection to deletion. The answers are usually far more informative.
Technology is only one part of a successful online assessment. The experience students have before and during an exam influences completion rates, support requests, and confidence in the assessment process itself.
A proctoring platform selection process should therefore evaluate the complete student journey rather than focusing exclusively on monitoring capabilities. How long does system setup take? Can students test their devices before exam day? What happens if the internet connection drops? How quickly can they receive support?
Small usability improvements often have a greater operational impact than additional monitoring features.
Questions to include in your RFP include:
Evidence to request:
What experienced buyers look for:
Ask vendors to demonstrate the experience on an average student laptop, not just a perfectly configured demo environment. Proctoring pilots should reflect real exam conditions whenever possible.
An online proctoring platform may perform flawlessly during a small pilot, but buying teams need confidence that it will remain stable when thousands of students sit examinations simultaneously.
Scalability is about more than supporting a large number of concurrent users. Institutions should also consider system availability, disaster recovery, incident response, reporting performance, and the platform's ability to recover gracefully from unexpected failures.
Reliability becomes particularly important during high-stakes assessment periods, where even brief service interruptions can disrupt hundreds or thousands of candidates.
Questions to include in your RFP include:
Evidence to request:
What experienced buyers look for
Annual exam volume rarely tells the full story. Ask vendors about their peak concurrent assessment volume, as this provides a much better indication of real-world scalability.
Selecting a vendor is only the beginning of the project. The success of an online proctoring implementation often depends on planning, training, communication, and ongoing support just as much as on the technology itself.
A structured implementation helps institutions introduce new assessment workflows with minimal disruption while giving faculty, administrators, and students the confidence to use the platform effectively from day one.
Experienced buyers therefore evaluate both the proctoring software and the people/processes supporting it.
Questions to include in your RFP include:
Evidence to request:
What experienced buyers look for:
The strongest implementations rarely begin with a full rollout. A well-planned proctoring pilot allows test organizers to validate workflows, collect feedback, and refine assessment policies before expanding to larger cohorts.
An online proctoring platform is typically adopted for many years rather than for a single assessment cycle. Along with the product available today, customers need evaluate the organization behind it.
Company stability, higher-education experience, product roadmap, customer support, release cadence, and long-term investment all influence whether a vendor will continue to meet institutional needs throughout the contract.
This requirement becomes particularly important when comparing vendors with similar functionality. In many cases, the deciding factor is no longer the feature set, but confidence that the vendor will remain a reliable partner as institutional requirements evolve.
Questions to include in your RFP include:
Evidence to request:
What experienced buyers look for:
Well-known customer logos can be reassuring, but the most valuable references often come from institutions with assessment models, student populations, and technical environments similar to your own.
Writing an RFP for online proctoring isn't about creating the longest possible list of requirements. It's about asking questions that help distinguish meaningful differences between platforms.
The requirement areas discussed in this article appear repeatedly across higher education procurement processes because they address the issues that most influence long-term success: academic integrity, accessibility, security, student experience, operational efficiency, and institutional risk.
Not every institution will prioritize these requirements in exactly the same way. A medical school delivering high-stakes licensing examinations may evaluate vendors differently from a community college running online midterms. The value of a well-structured RFP lies in identifying the outcomes that matter most to your institution and giving vendors the opportunity to demonstrate how they meet them.
While technology is evolving, the principles behind good enterprise buying process remain remarkably consistent. Focus on outcomes, request evidence alongside feature lists, and evaluate platforms in the context of your own assessment processes. Those conversations are far more likely to lead to a successful implementation than simply comparing specification sheets.
Every institution has its own assessment workflows, security requirements, and procurement priorities. We'd be happy to discuss your evaluation criteria and demonstrate how OctoProctor addresses them in practice.
Book a meetingProctoring software requirements define the capabilities, integrations, security controls, accessibility features, reporting, and operational criteria an institution expects from an online proctoring platform. Well-defined requirements make it easier to compare vendors objectively during an RFP process.
An effective online proctoring requirements checklist typically covers identity verification, assessment security, AI and live proctoring, reporting, LMS integration, accessibility, privacy, student experience, scalability, implementation, and long-term vendor support. The exact priorities depend on the institution's assessment model and compliance requirements.
A meaningful proctoring software comparison looks beyond feature lists. Colleges should compare how vendors approach identity assurance, assessment security, accessibility, reporting, implementation, integrations, and customer support while requesting demonstrations and evidence for every critical requirement.
Choosing proctoring software starts with defining your institution's assessment goals rather than comparing vendor brochures. A structured buying process, clear evaluation criteria, pilot testing, and evidence-based demonstrations help institutions identify the solution that best fits their academic, operational, and compliance requirements.
An exam proctoring solutions RFP should include functional, technical, operational, security, accessibility, privacy, implementation, and support requirements. It should also define evaluation criteria and request practical demonstrations, documentation, and customer references from shortlisted vendors.
When evaluating online proctoring vendors, ask how identity verification works, how assessment security is maintained, how incidents are reviewed, how integrations are implemented, and what evidence accompanies automated decisions. Focus on workflows rather than simple feature availability.
When evaluating proctoring service vendors, institutions should compare the complete service model, including live proctoring operations, implementation support, accessibility, reporting, service-level agreements, and long-term customer support—not only the software itself.
Some proctored exam vendors primarily provide managed live proctoring services, while others deliver technology platforms that institutions operate themselves. Many proctoring vendors now support both approaches, allowing colleges to choose between vendor-managed, institution-managed, or hybrid delivery models.
Proctoring requirements should be reviewed whenever assessment policies, accessibility standards, security expectations, or institutional technology change. Many colleges also revisit their requirements before contract renewals or major procurement exercises.
