Sitting an Exam
One computer-based exam from end to end — a teacher writing questions, a paper sealed and timetabled, a hall opened and a candidate admitted to it, an hour watched live, scripts marked the moment they are handed in, and the mark arriving on a report card at home.
Ninety minutes, six people, and a mark nobody typed twice
A school exam is one of the few things a school does where every role in the building is involved on the same morning, in a fixed order, under a clock. A teacher has to have written the questions weeks earlier. An exams officer has to have found a room and a window. Somebody has to physically let the candidates in. Somebody has to watch. And by the evening a parent expects to know how it went. EaseAcademia carries all of that as one chain: the questions are written once, the paper is sealed so it cannot change under the timetable, the marking happens at submission rather than over a weekend, and the score lands on the term’s report card as a column — not as a separate number somebody re-keys. Computer-based testing is a paid module; the report card at the end of it is not.
On this page
Write the questions once, use them for years
Questions live in banks, not in papers. A bank belongs to one subject and one year group, and the teachers of that subject build it between them — which is what makes the second year of running computer-based exams cheaper than the first. The lead subject teacher owns the subject’s banks and can see a colleague’s, but cannot edit a word of it.
The banks for what you teach
Every bank in the subjects and year groups this teacher is assigned to — their own, and their colleagues’ in the same subject. The star on a subject means they lead it, and leading is what opens other people’s banks to them at all.
Inside a bank
The questions themselves, filterable by type, difficulty and state. A draft is private to whoever wrote it until they publish it; publishing is what makes a question available to the composer.
The answer key is part of the question
A question is written with the thing that will mark it. A multiple-choice item carries its key, whether credit is all-or-nothing or partial, and what a wrong selection costs. The editor validates as you type — a correct option that is not among the options is refused here, not discovered at exam time.
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Compose the paper, then seal it
A paper is an arrangement of questions plus the rules for how it is served. Both are decided before the paper exists, because rearranging an exam is only free while nobody is booked to sit it. Sealing is the step that ends the argument: it freezes an encrypted copy of every question, so editing a bank afterwards cannot change what candidates actually meet.
The paper, as candidates will meet it
Sections, and the questions inside them in the order they will be sat. Retitle a section, move a question between sections, take one off entirely — a question removed is unplaced rather than lost, and the picker puts it back.
How it is served, and what passes
The rubric candidates read, whether questions and options are shuffled, whether they may go back, the pass mark, and what a candidate is shown the instant they submit. Shuffling is per-paper because it is a decision about that exam, not about the school.
Sealing it
Creating and sealing are one action, and it is the one that matters. Sealing freezes an encrypted copy of every question on the paper, which is both what protects the exam and what makes it schedulable — an unsealed paper is invisible to the exams officer.
See this on your own school’s data.
Every screen in “Compose the paper, then seal it” is the live product, not a mockup. Create your school account, or have us walk you through it on a call.
A room, a window, and a cohort
Scheduling is the exams office’s job and it is a different job from writing the paper. A series is the exam period the school talks about — “Second Term Examination” — and sealed papers are timetabled into it, each against one cohort in one window, in one room the school actually has.
The exam periods the school runs
Series first, papers second. A series belongs to a term and starts empty, which is deliberate: it gives the office something to plan into before any paper is ready.
The timetable, with its cost on it
One series opened: each row a sealed paper in one window, with the room, the cohort and the number of candidates. The estimated cost sits above it — CBT is billed per subject sitting, so the timetable is also the invoice, and the office sees that before publishing rather than after.
Publishing is what candidates can see
Until the series is published, none of it exists for a pupil. Publishing requires every paper scheduled inside it to be sealed already — the office cannot accidentally put an unfinished exam in front of a hall.
Set this up for your team.
Every screen in “A room, a window, and a cohort” is the live product, not a mockup. Create your school account, or have us walk you through it on a call.
Exam day, from the invigilator’s chair
Two things happen in this hour and they are separate on purpose. First the hall is opened — nobody starts writing because a clock struck, but because a person let them in. Then it is watched, and the watching is a record rather than an alarm: the system reports, and a human decides.
Every hall at once
A school running six papers at nine o’clock reads one board rather than six tabs — who is writing, who has not begun, where flags have been raised, and which room has a candidate signed in on two machines.
The door
A candidate who has signed in is not yet in the exam. They stand at the door until an invigilator admits them, and the grant belongs to the MACHINE they are sitting at — so a pupil who moves to a different computer has to be admitted again, which is exactly the moment a school wants to look up.
One hall, live
Who has started, how far each candidate has got, and what has been recorded against them — with the running cost of the sitting beside it. The board updates itself; nobody refreshes a page to invigilate.
One candidate’s record
Every signal, warning and fault against one person, and the machines their paper is open on. Signals do not punish by themselves — a tier issues a message, and ending a child’s exam stays a human decision, taken with a reason, on a separate control.
A second machine, ten minutes in
Two devices on one sitting is flagged within about a minute and a half. The lock is applied per device, never per sitting: the phone that appeared is shut out and the candidate carries on writing on the machine in front of them. Lifting a lock can credit the lost minutes back.
Ready to run your school on this?
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The same hour, from the desk
Everything in the last phase has a counterpart here, and the candidate’s half runs in a different application. `/exam` is its own segment with its own store and its own tokens: an exam session can reach the exam portal and nothing else, which is why these frames wear a different shell from every other screen in this walkthrough.
A different door entirely
Candidates sign in with the registration number their school issued, on a portal that is not the student dashboard — wearing the school’s own colours and its own photographs. A pupil signed into the dashboard is not signed into an exam, and cannot become so by navigating.
Sat down, and waiting
This is the other side of the door. The candidate is signed in, at their machine, looking at the exam — and nothing is happening, because no invigilator has admitted them yet. The screen says so plainly rather than showing a start button that would fail.
The briefing
Between the lobby and the paper: the rules, the school’s own instructions, and the shape of the exam — how many sections, how many questions, how long. Readable before the window opens, and nothing on it starts anything.
Sitting the paper
One question at a time, with the candidate’s identity and their remaining time in the column beside it, and a map of which questions are answered. Answers save as they are given — a machine that dies mid-exam has not eaten the last twenty minutes.
Check, then hand it in
Before submitting, the candidate is told how many questions are unanswered, which ones they are, and — in plain words — that unanswered questions score zero. Submitting is final for that attempt, and the marking has already happened.
See this on your own school’s data.
Every screen in “The same hour, from the desk” is the live product, not a mockup. Create your school account, or have us walk you through it on a call.
Marking that is already done
Auto-scoring is not the interesting part; what a teacher does with it is. Every objective question was marked at submission, so the review sheet opens with the whole hall already scored, and the teacher’s job is the exceptions — a short answer to read, a script with a flag on it, a question the whole class got wrong.
The whole hall, scored
Every candidate with their score, their time and their integrity standing, ordered so the exceptions come to the top. Nothing here was marked overnight — it was marked as each paper was handed in.
One script, as it was marked
A candidate’s paper question by question: what they answered, what the key said, what it scored and why. It is the screen a teacher needs when a parent asks — and the screen a school needs when a candidate appeals.
Push it into the term’s marks
This is where a CBT exam stops being its own thing. The schedule’s exam kind names one of the school’s own assessment types — “Examination”, “Mid-term test” — and the push lands the marks in that type’s gradebook bucket, never in a category of the module’s own invention that a report card could not place.
Set this up for your team.
Every screen in “Marking that is already done” is the live product, not a mockup. Create your school account, or have us walk you through it on a call.
What the school keeps
The teacher’s review sheet is a worklist and it empties. The school needs something that does not: a read-only register of what was sat and what it produced, and figures that answer the questions a head of department actually asks.
The results register
Series, then papers, then candidates — the order a school talks about an exam in. It is read-only by design: this is the record, and the place to change a mark is the script it came from.
Which questions did the teaching, and which did not
Item-level statistics off the same scripts: the questions everyone got right, the ones everyone got wrong, the distractors that pulled the strong candidates. It is the part of computer-based testing that pays for itself, and it is only possible because the answers were structured in the first place.
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Not an exam result — a grade
The pupil never sees a “CBT result”, and that is the design working. What they see is their subject’s mark for the term, with the exam sitting inside it as the component it always was.
The term’s marks, exam included
The score pushed two phases ago appears as the examination column of the subject’s result, next to the continuous assessment that was there already — one report, assembled from wherever its parts came from.
See this on your own school’s data.
Every screen in “Not an exam result — a grade” is the live product, not a mockup. Create your school account, or have us walk you through it on a call.
The same mark, at home
The last hand-off, and the shortest. Nobody printed anything, nobody was asked to collect anything, and no figure was typed a second time between the candidate pressing submit and their family reading the result.
The report card
The parent opens the same result their child sees, per ward, with the school’s own remarks on it. Between the exam hall and this screen the mark passed through a teacher’s approval and the school’s release — and nothing else.
Set this up for your team.
Every screen in “The same mark, at home” is the live product, not a mockup. Create your school account, or have us walk you through it on a call.
Run your whole school on one connected platform
Start with the base package, switch on the modules you need, and give every parent, student and staff member a single place to log in.