Finally, thanks to the oversight and insights of organizations like PES, institutions can now offer secure web-based testing that is remotely proctored.
One of the issues with MOOCs is cheating, and a proctored exam administered by an established company like Pearson is a way to verify that students are staying honest.
About 300 of the roughly 46, 000 students who took the class with an MIT professor filed into test-taking centers around the world in the hopes of earning a "proctored honor certificate" from the class signed by the professor.
Cheating is rare on expensive tests such as the SATs, ACTs, APs and NAEP because test-givers and their contractors spend what it takes to have their sessions proctored, their test booklets kept secure before and after their administration, and the scoring done by individuals or machines in distant locations that are unaffected by the results of that scoring.