Schoolyear

Schoolyear is exam security software for schools and universities that hold digital exams in person on laptops, including laptops the students own. Its product is called the Safe Exam Workspace, and the home page sums up the pitch as "Transform any device into a secure, controlled exam workspace." The buyer is an institution's assessment or exam team, and the company is based in 's-Hertogenbosch in the Netherlands, according to the contact details on its site. Schoolyear is not a remote proctoring service: it does not film students at home. It secures the device in an exam hall, a classroom or any other room the institution turns into a temporary exam lab.

The problem it is built around

The company's starting point is bring your own device, or BYOD. When an institution owns and manages every exam computer, its IT department controls the operating system and the installed software. On a student's own laptop that control is gone, and Schoolyear's guide to exam browsers puts it plainly: "Students are administrators of their own laptops." A student who runs an exam application locally can, in the company's words, "open personal files, access cloud storage like OneDrive, or use AI assistants built into the application, such as Copilot in Excel." The home page adds the newer pressure on top of that, saying fraud prevention has become harder "with the introduction of ChatGPT and the use of student-owned devices."

How the Safe Exam Workspace works

When an exam starts in Schoolyear, the device enters a secure and controlled exam mode. Unauthorized applications are blocked, along with the common tools for getting around exam security: screen sharing tools, remote desktop software and virtual machines. Students reach only the web pages that have been whitelisted, and the personal file explorer is fully blocked.

The company argues that on a student-owned device, blocking alone is not enough, because a student with administrator rights may find a way around it. So Schoolyear adds a verification layer. In a dashboard, invigilators are alerted in real time if one of the blocking mechanisms has been compromised, and the guide describes the product as one that "continuously verifies that the lockdown holds during the exam." The home page stresses that this is done with "no screen recording or monitoring needed": the software checks the device, not the student's face.

Schoolyear is closed source, which the company says makes it much harder for students to study how its security works. When a new bypass is found, a dedicated security team pushes a fix to all customers at once, and updates install automatically in the background with no manual action from students. The guide says this is backed by professional support and a service-level agreement.

Exams in real desktop applications

The second use case is skills testing in desktop software. Institutions usually need a dedicated computer lab for exams in applications like Excel, SPSS, Matlab, R and VScode with Python, because the software has to be installed and locked down. The Safe Exam Workspace instead runs these applications "in a fully isolated environment on any student device, without software installation," the home page says, giving every student the same exam setting while preventing internet or personal file access. Inside that isolated environment students cannot reach personal files, AI assistants or third-party add-ins. The company's guide claims that "Schoolyear is currently the only platform" offering a secure path for desktop application exams on student-owned devices. A customer story on the site describes how ROC van Twente runs secure application exams on students' own laptops.

Running exams at scale

The third use case is capacity. The home page tells institutions not to be "constrained by the number of seats in your own computer labs" and to use students' own devices to "transform any room into a temporary exam computer lab." That makes continuous assessment and large exams during exam weeks possible without booking every lab on campus. The guide adds that Schoolyear also works on managed lab computers and supports managed Chromebooks, and that it handles both web-based exams and desktop applications.

The home page backs the scale claim with its own figures: 150+ institutions, 1M+ BYOD exams in the last 12 months, more than 8,000 different laptop types, and 1200+ students in a single exam. The Helpcenter includes a laptop check, so students can test their device before exam day, alongside separate help sections for students and teachers, an FAQ and a status page.

Integrations and teacher control

Schoolyear integrates with exam and LMS platforms, and the guide names Canvas LMS, Moodle and D2L Brightspace as examples. The home page describes two ways to set up an exam: manually whitelist websites, files or desktop applications, or use one of the integrations for a fully automated flow. When a teacher needs to change an exam setup, such as allowing one more file or website, the guide says they can do it themselves from within their assessment platform or LMS quiz, without waiting for IT. That point matters to Schoolyear's customers. Marco Huijser, a project manager quoted on the home page, says "The involvement of IM /IT and related costs of overhead now has been reduced to almost nothing. Our teachers are back in control of their secure digital exams."

What customers say

Karin Vennix, Process Manager Digital Assessments at Fontys University of Applied Sciences, says Fontys wanted a reliable, integrated way to prevent fraud during digital knowledge tests taken on students' laptops at a Fontys location, and that "The Schoolyear product works as expected." Jurriën de Jong of ROCMN says the institution has been involved in developing and testing Schoolyear "since the very first releases", that it was promised a scalable, user-friendly way to run digital exams on BYOD, and that "Schoolyear has more than fulfilled these promises!"

Pricing and trial

The site publishes no prices. Institutions can book a demo or download a whitepaper, and the exam browser guide invites readers to "Request a 14-day Schoolyear trial."

Limits and who it suits

The company is open about its scope. The guide says "Schoolyear is designed exclusively for in-person exams" and that it does not include remote proctoring features such as webcam monitoring or behavioral detection. According to the same guide, institutions using Schoolyear generally hold most of their exams in person and use a separate proctoring solution for remote assessments. A fully online program whose students sit every exam from home would need that second tool.

Schoolyear suits schools, colleges and universities that hold supervised digital exams on campus and want to stop depending on fixed lab seats: a university running large exams in exam week on students' laptops, a school that tests students in Excel, or a statistics or programming course that needs SPSS, R or Python in the exam. Its strengths are the verification layer, the isolated desktop applications and the fact that teachers can manage exam settings themselves. Institutions that want camera-based supervision of students at home should look at it as the on-campus half of their exam setup.