Why Nigel
We built Nigel because proctoring lost its way.
Somewhere along the line, assessment integrity became about controlling students instead of collecting evidence. We think that's wrong, so we built a proctoring alternative that starts from evidence instead of surveillance.
How we got here.
The proctoring industry started with a reasonable goal: protect the value of a credential when the exam moved online. But somewhere between there and here, the tools turned inward. Lockdown browsers took over student machines, disabled assistive technology, and broke outright on non-standard hardware. A student with a screen reader, an older laptop, or an unusual keyboard layout became a technical problem to be excluded rather than a person to be served. The exam experience began to feel less like an assessment and more like a search of your belongings.
Then came behavioral scoring. Algorithms began grading not just answers but bodies: how often a student looked away, how their keystrokes rhythmed, whether their face stayed centered in frame. These systems have flagged students for glancing at scratch paper, for living in busy households, and, in well-documented cases, for having dark skin that the face-tracking models handled poorly. A statistical suspicion score became a stand-in for evidence, and students had no way to see inside it.
Worse, many platforms wired those scores directly to consequences. Auto-suspension systems ended exams and referred students for discipline before any human being reviewed a single frame of video. Some vendors layered on emotion detection, claiming to read stress or deception from a webcam feed, a capability that institutions could neither explain to students nor defend to a review board. When the algorithm is the accuser, the judge, and the record keeper, due process does not survive contact.
The backlash is no longer hypothetical. Courts have ruled against compelled room scans, biometric-privacy lawsuits have been filed and settled, student governments have passed resolutions, faculty senates have pushed back, and institutions have quietly dropped vendors after public incidents. The industry earned this. We started Nigel because we believe the next generation of assessment integrity has to be built on a different foundation entirely: consent given up front, evidence a person can review, and nothing taken from the student by force.
Sources: Ogletree v. Cleveland State University (N.D. Ohio 2022, compelled room scan held unconstitutional at a public university); Illinois BIPA class settlement (2023, biometric data collection by a proctoring tool). Nigel's room capture is consent-based and policy-disclosed by design.
Integrity is not something you enforce. It is something you verify.
That distinction changes everything about how an assessment integrity system should be designed. Enforcement assumes guilt and builds walls. Verification assumes a process and collects evidence. Nigel watches the exam environment for concrete, observable things: an unauthorized device, an extra person, materials that are not on the allowed list. It does not score behavior, read faces, or guess at intent.
The same principle governs screen awareness. Where lockdown proctoring tools like Proctorio and Respondus seize control of the desktop as a condition of taking the exam, Nigel asks. At the start of an assessment the student can choose to share their screen or a specific window through the same standard browser prompt they would see in a video call. What they share becomes one more stream of evidence for a human reviewer. Nothing is locked, nothing is restricted, and nothing happens without the student's ongoing consent.
When something is flagged, the flag is a piece of evidence, not a verdict. It goes to a human reviewer at the institution, with the video, the timestamp, and the context attached. The student can see what was flagged and why, and can contest it through an appeals process that is built into every session rather than bolted on afterward.
This is not a softer version of proctoring. It is a more defensible approach to assessment integrity. Evidence that a human reviewed holds up in an academic integrity hearing. An opaque suspicion score does not. Institutions that adopt Nigel are not trading rigor for kindness. They are getting both, because the system produces something a review board can actually use.
And because students take their exams in a normal browser, with their own tools and their own accommodations intact, the assessment measures what it was supposed to measure all along: what they know.
Control without lockdown.
Institutions never stopped needing control. What failed was the delivery mechanism. Legacy proctoring tools treat control and lockdown as the same thing: to enforce a rule, seize the machine. Nigel separates them. Institutions configure what each assessment requires through three policy tiers, Honor, Observed, and Verified, and students consent to those requirements as a condition of the exam. The requirement is the institution's. The consent is the student's. The machine stays the student's too.
Focus mode is the clearest example. When an assessment calls for restriction, the student chooses to silence notifications and stay in the exam tab for the duration. The commitment is made by the student, not imposed by the platform. And the student can always step out. The consequence of disengaging is an amber flag with evidence attached, reviewed by a person at the institution. Not a terminated session, not an automatic penalty, not a locked screen.
The deeper difference is transparency over restriction. Legacy tools monitor invisibly and restrict visibly. Nigel inverts that. A live transparency beacon shows the student exactly what is being captured at every moment, and nothing records silently. When the session ends, the evidence assembles into a package for human reviewers, and both sides receive a cryptographic session receipt documenting what was captured, consented to, and flagged. Control, it turns out, never required taking anything from the student. It required writing everything down.
The proctoring alternative, feature by feature.
A category comparison. Not every vendor does every one of these things, but every one of these things is real.
| Capability | Traditional Proctoring | Nigel Integrity |
|---|---|---|
| Browser control | Full lockdown required | Normal browser, no restrictions |
| Screen visibility | Forced desktop control and monitoring | Voluntary, consent-based screen sharing |
| When AI flags something | Auto-suspends or auto-fails | Routes to human reviewer |
| Behavioral analysis | Scores eye movement, keystrokes | Never. AI sees materials, not behavior |
| Emotion detection | Some vendors use it | Never. Not built. Never will be. |
| Institutional requirements | One-size lockdown for every exam | Three policy tiers, configured per assessment |
| Focus restriction | Platform seizes the machine | Student self-restricts, consent-gated |
| What students see during capture | Opaque background monitoring | Live transparency beacon |
| Session record | Vendor-held logs | Cryptographic session receipts |
| Student appeals | Afterthought or absent | Built into every session |
| Data control | Vendor-controlled | Institution-controlled |
| FERPA model | Varies | School official exception |
A note from the founder
“Assessment integrity should protect the value of a credential without destroying the experience of earning one. That's what we built Nigel to do.”
Ryan Vance, CEO
See what evidence-based integrity looks like.
A 20-minute demo. No lockdown software required.