Digital Online Exams

[Matt Strickland]

Hi all,

I've been asked to look at digital exam platforms like exam.net, testportal.net, digiexam, Inspera etc.

Can anyone share their experience, and do one of these offline or online?

Integrated with SMS/Kamar or M365/Teams?

Assuming there's not a future to use NZQA's/Assessment Master for internal/derived grades exams.

Matt

[Stephen Caustick]

Hi Matt,

We have recently started to use Exam.net, mainly for English exams. I have not heard any complaints.

There is an issue with Chromebooks, The exam.net app needs to be run in Kiosk mode, and the device must be provisioned with your school. If you have a number of students with BYOD Chromebooks, they will need to use a school owned device to run exam.net.

Windows and MacOS run the app from the browser.

Hope that helps.

Stephen Caustick

IT Technician

Hastings Boys' High School

(06) 8730365 ex 847

step...@hastingsboys.school.nz

---

From: 'Matt Strickland' via Techies for schools <techies-f...@googlegroups.com>
Sent: 08 September 2025 09:48
To: Techies for schools <techies-f...@googlegroups.com>
Subject: [techies-for-schools] Digital Online Exams

 

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[Mark Chang]

Hi Matt,

we use Exam.net as well for our digital exams for English, Computer Science, Health, Media Studies, Te Reo and Business Studies for Year 11 to 13.

No integration with KAMAR (or any SMS for that matter) so you will need to do manual grade entry. Students simply enter an exam key (a 6 to 8 alphanumeric string) that uniquely identifies the exam and they are granted access. They type in their name to identifiy themselves to the system.

Exam.net gives you the option of setting security levels for exams. High security involves using Safe Exam Browser that needs to be installed (Windows and MacOS) while medium and low security exams utilise any browser platform with Javascript enabled.

For school Chromebooks, as Stephen mentioned, we just create an OU in Google with the relevant policies applied and move the Chromebooks into that OU. Simple enough.

You can download logs for each exam held that shows whether the student changed focus of the browser tab and for how long. This goes a long way for medium security exams to determine if students are cheating or not.

All the problems we had been facing are all human problems. For example,

- Students don't know how to install Safe Exam Browser on Windows or MacOS.

- Teachers give the wrong code to students for their exams (!!!)

- Students run multiple MacOS user profiles (fast user switching) at the same time. SEB detects this and refuses to run.

They charge in USD though; the exchange rate is really not in NZ's favour. :-(

Highly recommended to all. 

Regards,

Mark

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[Sue Way]

We have been using Exam.net this year for all our digital exams.

No integration with Kamar, but if you use a code there is not the requirement quite so much.

We have not been getting students to install the App on their BYOD. We get the exam supervisiors to check that they only have one tab open and extensionss removed especially Read&Write extensions, and others have been removed. Teachers can see the logs if required. It worked well for our derived grades exams a few weeks ago.

Our Students with Speical Assessment Conditions computer use have been using Exam.net for 2 years. It has worked well for them and saved our Learning Services team a heap of work.

Sue Way | IT Services Director (she, her)

Te Kura Manawaroa o Pipitea | Wellington Girls' College

Pipitea Street, Thorndon, Wellington 6011