IU International University is Germany’s largest university, with around 130,000 students. For them, online exams aren’t a nice-to-have — they’re core to the experience. Exams are the most crucial, stressful, and important moments in any educational journey, hence providing the very best experience is one key element to ensure learner happiness. And when you sit down to prove what you’ve learned, the last thing you should have to worry about is whether the technology will hold up, or whether the person watching over your exam actually knows what they’re doing.

For a long time, that promise held. Then, in 2024, IU’s longstanding proctoring provider underwent sudden, unexpected changes. And the cracks appeared fast: technical disruptions. Inconsistent proctor quality. A user experience that simply didn’t meet what students — or the university — had every right to expect.

Dissatisfaction was rising. And when you’re responsible for the exam experience of that many people, “we’ll sort it out eventually” is not an option. IU’s reputation and its students’ experience needed attention, and they needed it now.

Of course we did the obvious thing first: we went looking for a new partner. We scanned the market thoroughly, expecting to find someone who could simply take over and do it better. We didn’t.

We had a choice. Lower our standards to fit what the market offered — or raise the bar ourselves. So we built our own solution.

We leaned on more than a decade of experience and worked with strong partners to build something around a simple conviction: exams are stressful enough. The people taking them deserve a calm, fair, genuinely human experience — and the institutions behind them deserve integrity they can stand behind.

We put highly skilled, Europe-based, bilingual proctors at the center. We obsessed over onboarding, over waiting times, over the small moments that decide whether a student feels supported or surveilled. With all this, we built a strong base that stays reliable even at high volume.

Then we watched the numbers come in:

IU regained its students’ trust. The problem we’d set out to fix wasn’t just fixed — it had become a genuine strength.

Here’s the thing about solving a problem really well: other people notice. The more we talked to universities, certification bodies, and training providers, the clearer it became that we weren’t the only ones who wanted this. There was a real, widespread desire for high-quality human proctoring made in Europe — and almost nothing on the market that delivered it the way we aimed for.

So we made it official. The IU Group founded Certory as an independent unit, built to bring proven, top-quality human proctoring to every institution that values learner experience and integrity as highly as we do.

Three commitments sit at the core of what we do:

We didn’t stumble into “Human-First” as a marketing line. We arrived at it because we know that the alternative is not an option: what happens when quality gets automated away or squeezed out by the lowest bid is not what learners deserve.

An exam is a human moment. Someone is showing what they can do, often under a lot of pressure. Meeting that moment with a skilled, engaged person — rather than a tech black box making silent decisions — isn’t nostalgia. It’s what makes the result fair, and what makes it trustworthy.

That’s the whole idea behind Certory. We help people show what they can do — and we help organizations trust the result. We’re only getting started. And honestly? We can’t wait to see what comes next.

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Certory is Human-First Live Proctoring, made in Europe — the human layer of trust for high-stakes online exams, admissions tests, and professional assessments. Celebrating true achievement.

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