Follow these steps ahead of the examination season to ensure students can access only the appropriate websites, software and apps.
Review your capturing policy
If your school has a policy against monitoring students using screen captures during exams, you may choose to temporarily uninstall Monitor from devices. When exams end, reinstall Monitor on the devices.
Important
Because Smoothwall Browser and Monitor are deployed in the same way, uninstalling Monitor also uninstalls Smoothwall Browser, and you won’t be able to filter content on iPads.
Ensure devices can access the right websites and software
Step 1: Create Custom Categories of domains and URLs
Contact your software providers and exam awarding organisations for a list of domains and URLs needed for exams. Add these to one or more Custom Categories.
Step 2: HTTPS Inspection (On-Premise Appliance)
We recommend you have a HTTPS Inspection policy to Decrypt and Inspect everything.
If the websites, software and apps you need to allow access to won’t work with HTTPS Inspection, add a policy with the Action as Do not inspect for the Categories you set up in Step 1. Order this above any wider policies or policies that Decrypt and Inspect everything.
Step 3: Allow or block access to the appropriate websites
You can set up Web Filter Policies specific to the exam season in advance, to turn on when the exams begin.
- Set Allow Policies for the Categories you’ve identified or set up in Step 1.
- Set Block policies in place to prevent access to content. For example, you can prevent access to AI tools such as ChatGPT by having a policy to Block the AI Tools and Unsafe AI Chat categories.
- Move these policies above your existing regular policies so they will apply when enabled.
Alternatively, some schools choose a ‘Walled Garden’ approach. This setup blocks all access except the websites and apps needed for the exams.
To turn policies on and off without removing them, use the toggle in the Enabled column (On-Premise Appliance) or Status column (Cloud Filter).
Step 4: Test your filtering policies
Before exams begin, test your filtering rules using a device filtered with the policies you plan to use.
- Visit different websites to test that blocked and allowed categories work as expected.
- Review logs or reports for the test device or username.
- Add any missing domains or URLs to your Custom Categories.