The problem
The faculty was running a single national entrance exam attended by roughly 12,000 applicants per cycle, in three rented venues. Travel, accommodation, and printing cost the institution well over €40 per applicant before a single test was scored. Add invigilator pay, manual scanning of answer sheets, and a two-week dispute window, and the admissions team was effectively running a logistics company every spring.
The Vice-Dean for Education had two non-negotiables: keep the academic standard of the test, and stay inside Czech and EU data-protection law. Existing remote-proctoring vendors all required either US data transfers or month-long IT integration projects.
Why Gater
They evaluated three platforms over six weeks. Gater was chosen on three points:
- EU data residency by default. All evidence and personal data stay in EU regions. The DPA was pre-signed and matched the university's template.
- Per-session pricing. The previous vendor quoted per enrolled student, including the 18% no-show rate. Gater charged only for the 9,840 applicants who actually sat the exam.
- Self-serve question bank. Faculty staff loaded their existing question pool from a spreadsheet on day one. No professional-services engagement was required.
The pilot
The first cohort — 600 applicants for a niche dentistry programme — went live four weeks after kick-off. Twelve high-severity flags were raised by the AI; nine were dismissed by the review team after watching the evidence bundle, three were confirmed and resulted in invalidated tests. Every decision was supported by a tamper-evident ZIP archive, and not a single appeal succeeded.
“The thing that surprised me wasn't the AI flagging — it was that I could show the appeals committee a single ZIP file with timestamps, snapshots, and a SHA-256 manifest, and the conversation ended there.”
The full round
Two months later they ran the entire 12,000-applicant general medicine round on Gater. End-to-end, from registration close to published results, took 4 days instead of the previous 15. The admissions office moved 1.8 full-time staff onto other work permanently.
What we’d do differently
The faculty's honest feedback: schedule the system-check window earlier — too many applicants ran the device check on exam day, and a small minority needed live support to enable webcam permissions on managed school laptops. We've since shipped a system-check reminder email 48 hours before the exam.