Exams will outlive everything else

If anything from today's academic toolkit survives, it will be exams. As long as human knowledge and skill matter, you cannot get rid of assessment. And the more that's riding on a result, the more it matters that the result is real.

The stakes are only going up. An exam is the difference between having a job and not, between emigrating and not. When that much depends on a score, people will try to beat the exam, and the tools for beating it are getting cheap. So the tools for protecting it have to get very good.

I'd like to say we saw all this coming. We didn't. What we saw at Rosalyn in 2018 was simpler: education was going digital, and in a digital world academic integrity would become one of the central problems. We didn't see the AI wave. We saw the need for an exam system built for the digital age, one that was secure, scalable, cheap, accessible, and didn't make students miserable.

The market was slower than we expected. We thought we were early; we didn't know how early. It took four or five years, a pandemic, and the AI revolution for the timing to arrive. A lot of institutions still believe a human watching a screen is the gold standard, even though a human can't watch keyboard, mouse, gaze, audio, and video at once, and a human's attention fades by the second hour.

What works, in my experience, is not AI instead of people and not people instead of AI. It's AI that analyzes everything and escalates, and a person who decides, fast, with the evidence in front of them. The AI doesn't get tired. The person brings judgment and ethics the model doesn't have. Together they get a one-to-one ratio that no proctoring center can afford with humans alone.

That's the part I'd bet on outliving everything else.