“Our job is to break it.”
That was Jesse Dvorchak’s message to her team at exam body Cambridge International when they were testing its digital exams platform before it went live for schools across the world this summer.
With Dvorchak being director of digital exams, the scrutiny that she and her team would have come under if anything had broken in the real world makes it clear why she wanted everything thoroughly tested.
“We literally had to test every possibility. If we can break it and then fix it, that means when it goes out into the real world, it’s going to be OK,” she says.
The work appears to have paid off, though, with a completion rate of 100 per cent for the 5,700 digital exams sat at 19 exam centres in 10 countries for multiple-choice papers in IGCSE accounting, biology, chemistry, economics and physics, and Cambridge’s AS-level English general paper.
It is “a significant milestone” for the exam body, says Dvorchak, as Cambridge heads towards a target of 85 per cent of its high-stakes qualifications having a digital option by 2033.
Avoiding digital exam ‘nightmares’
What makes delivering a platform like this so complicated - and means there is a need for so much internal testing - Dvorchak explains, is the vastly different contexts Cambridge operates in, given its qualifications are used by schools in 160 countries.
This means preparing for everything from electrical outages in South Africa to the huge cohorts of students that sit exams in some US schools.
“They have to have the bandwidth in gymnasiums to sit 500 candidates,” she explains.
To prepare, Dvorchak says, the team worked with schools to uncover what they were most afraid of when it came to putting a digital exam in front of their students: “We understood the things that give them nightmares,” she says.
For example, one “worst-case scenario” for a school was a student getting kicked out of the platform while sitting a paper because of a power outage. So Dvorchak and her team have made sure the system design means that, when the student logs back in, they simply pick up where they left off.
Frontline reality
That sort of concern is not without foundation. At Kabojja International School in Uganda - a Cambridge early adopter school that ran live digital exams in June - during the accounting IGCSE, a connectivity problem did, indeed, mean that students were unable to log in.
But that was “probably the only nail-biting moment” and it didn’t last long, says Divine Vhovha, deputy head of curriculum and Cambridge centre coordinator at the school.
“We called our service provider and after about 10 minutes we were able to start the exam,” he says.
However, he feels his school’s biggest hurdle ahead of running the digital exams wasn’t to do with technical issues. Rather, it was about convincing the parents and students that making the leap to digital would be without detriment.
“We had to reassure them that this was still the same exam process and they are still going to get their results with the same integrity and nothing was going to happen,” Vhovha says.
Key to reassuring them and also to making sure that the introduction was a success were “troubleshooting and preparation”, he adds.
On exam day, invigilators were on hand to give students assurance and help them with any issues logging on to the platform.
“It’s just about making sure everyone is logged on, and calming them - it’s quite a long code to get on the platform sometimes, with random numbers and characters, so it’s just keeping them calm and making sure they know they aren’t losing time,” says Vhovha.
“The system compensates, everything is paused and they have the same amount of time.”
The same applies if there are buffering issues - or if students get kicked out of the platform.
“These are the things that can happen and we were there to tell them, ‘Don’t worry, we have it under control,’” says Vhovha.
“That’s the wonderful thing about the platform: it compensates for any lag in bandwidth or connectivity by making sure that time is not taken away from the student.”
Fitting out new exam spaces
In total, Kabojja students sat five digital papers: physics, chemistry, biology, economics and accounting. The largest cohort was 91 students sitting chemistry; the smallest cohort was five students sitting accounting.
Students sat the digital papers in the school’s three IT labs, which had been fitted out especially.
“We got standalone machines that allowed us to run the exams with the integrity and security that Cambridge required. It was a bit of a wholesale change. It could have been solved using software but we decided to go down the hardware route,” says Vhovha.
The school also invested in wooden partitions to protect candidates’ screens and to prevent cheating.
The payoff was much-reduced exam admin, with Vhovha describing the platform as “easy to use”, with no requirement for specialist IT skills.
He also now feels that his school is “ahead of the curve” and prepared for the inevitable increase in digital exams.
“I feel absolutely confident that we are ready,” he says.
In terms of the students, they liked being able to easily see how much time they had left in the exam via an on-screen timer, Vhovha says - as well as the way the system tracked progress and flagged any unanswered questions.
“There’s more interaction between the student and the exam because there’s feedback”, he says.
The importance of mocks
Hasan Malik, external exam coordinator and college counsellor at Al Hussan International Academy, Saudi Arabia, also said students enjoyed taking exams this way.
“It boosted candidates’ confidence as they opened the exam themselves, navigated freely on different questions in real time, completed and submitted as soon as they finished the exam,” he said, .
Ultimately, while schools have to prepare for the “all the worst-case scenarios” - including having paper copies of exams to hand in case internet access is lost completely - this year “all the students were able to get through [the exam]”, says Dvorchak.
One key lesson from the process was the importance of carrying out trials beforehand so students and staff knew what to expect.
Kabojja International School took part in the Cambridge mock digital exams, which have been run by the body since 2023, giving students access to practise digital papers.
“The mock exams were such a wonderful thing, says Vhovha. “The team at Cambridge was able to support us through that so the students had that prior experience.”
Emily Cook, an exams officer at Forest High School in Florida, which also took part in the live exams this year, offers the same view: “Definitely do the [digital] mock so that children and the teachers know what it looks like.”
It’s clear many schools are doing just that, with 45,000 mock exams having been completed since they were introduced in 66 countries.
This shows, though, that far fewer schools have signed up for real exams than for the mocks. Does this suggest many are still not confident about having real digital exams?
Part of this difference is simply down to logistics, says Dvorchak, who explains that while Cambridge runs three exam series every year, live digital exams will only be available for the June series until the other two series begin coming on board between 2028 and 2032.
“This phased approach helps to ensure a consistent, high-quality experience for schools and candidates as digital exams become more widely available,” she says.
Further to this, Cambridge also used “a readiness framework” to determine which countries were “market ready”, with access to the necessary wireless infrastructure, for instance.
Currently schools in Bulgaria, Czechia, Egypt, Kenya, Rwanda, Pakistan, Saudia Arabia, Tanzania, Uganda and the US have been able to run live online exams.
Still work to do
However, even with this framework, a relatively large number of schools also pulled out of running the digital exams.
“We had about 30 per cent attrition,” says Dvorchak.
In part this was because of the war in the Middle East, which led to some exams being cancelled. “About 10 or 12 centres had to drop out due to the Middle East conflict because they had to move to portfolio of evidence,” she says.
But it was also because some schools discovered - after signing up and starting the preparation process - that they didn’t really have the capability to manage live digital exams.
Dvorchak says: “That’s exactly what we wanted; that’s OK. This is about our centres becoming comfortable with the process and comfortable with the transition and understanding what it means to deliver digital at scale for them.”
Next year the target is to deliver digital exams in 300 centres, with Singapore scheduled to come on board - and India the following year, in 2028.
The complexity of what Cambridge is attempting to deliver is undeniable - but there are “myriad benefits”, says Dvorchak, including reduced exam admin - from paperwork to shipping - and faster turnaround times in terms of marking.
There’s no doubt this is what many other exam boards and regulators will be keen to find out more about, as debates about how and when it digital tests could be introduced rumble on - with the Ofqual chief regulator saying it is unlikely anything will happen in England until the 2030s.
For Dvorchak, though, the digital exams this year have shown clearly that while there is groundwork to do for schools to be ready, there are “benefits once you make the transition”, and the journey towards digital exams is well underway.
