Exam integrity

Cirrus is hosted on the world’s most stable, robust and secure servers, Amazon Web Services (AWS), and uses military grade encryption for all transactions, fail-safes in case of internet connection loss during exams, performance monitoring of exam sessions and much more.  Each customer have their own, individual Cirrus instance that is not shared with anybody else, with complete sovereignty of its instance. 

Cirrus' modular design means the prevention of cheating can be addressed, according to the needs of an exam (e.g. low or high stakes, formative or summative) through a combination of assessment design including multiple exam versions, 'blueprinting', randomised exam versions and randomised question selection. A substantial benefit of the Cirrus platform is that its powerful, built-in psychometric analysis can be used to ensure assessment equity and equivalence when randomisation or multiple versions are used. Another powerful tool to prevent cheating is that the majority of Cirrus' question types are automatically marked without human intervention, a feature that also saves significant effort to recruit, train and supervise human markers, and allows staff to focus on high value review and feedback.

Integrity in question and exam development, and marking and feedback can be further strengthened through Cirrus’ unique ability to seamlessly integrate external Subject Matter Experts (SME) and other stakeholders (e.g. accrediting organisations) into the creation, delivery and marking workflows within Cirrus. 

Other academic integrity options include the ability to leverage sophisticated pedagogical design of question types using Cirrus’ advanced features (e.g. audio responses, comprehensive integrated puzzles) to enable authentic assessment, locked browsers (e.g. to prevent web access and copying of questions) and use of integrated, online proctoring services (e.g. Proctorio) to invigilate exam conduct. The exciting potential for in-platform plagiarism detection is on Cirrus'  feature roadmap. 

Post event results and academic integrity queries are supported by Cirrus' sophisticated moderation, review and auditing dashboard including the ability to submit exams to detailed review and re-marking cycles, and the ability to rescore entire exam results if academic integrity or error call for it. It should be noted that the use of Cirrus as an holistic assessment platform supports academic integrity by minimising the chance of pre-event cheating during the assessment creation cycle or post event during marking and results publishing. 

The candidate dashboard gives an overview of all scheduled, upcoming assessments as well as the results of previously sat exams.

Low-stakes assessments

For low stakes assessments Cirrus doesn't recommend using any of the lockdown features, including remote proctoring or the safe exam browser. The threshold for taking a low-stakes test should be as low as possible.

Medium-stakes assessments

For medium stakes assessments Cirrus recommends using the IP range restriction, to prevent users from outside the IP range to access the test. You can also combine it with using the pincode as an extra layer of security. 

High-stakes assessments

There are several ways to guarantee the exam integrity of high-stakes assessments:

• Exams sat in an uncontrolled environment, like at the learners home: We recommend using remote proctoring. Cirrus offers both the possibility of live proctoring as well as fully automated proctoring using AI to detect suspicious behaviour. 
• Exams sat in a controlled environment, like a test centre: We recommend using Safe Exam Browser, which is seamlessly integrated with Cirrus. 
• You can combine the security settings for medium-stakes assessments with the lockdown browser to further strengthen the exam integrity. We DO NOT recommend using either IP restriction and Pincode in combination with remote proctoring.

If you want advice on how to best secure your exams, our consultants would be happy to discuss the options in detail with you.

Technical Details

Cirrus never sends answers (before candidate answered)

Cirrus never sends the correct answer to the browser of the candidate except if the author has decided Question Feedback must be shown (i.e. for Formative exams). Even then Cirrus will only send the correct answer and feedback after the candidate has submitted their answer.

This means a tech savvy candidate cannot build a tool to cheat by e.g. looking at the HTML source or intercept the question information.

Cirrus has an additional cryptographic check.

During an Exam all API responses (= information send from Cirrus to the candidate browser) are encrypted. Cirrus will create a "cryptographic hash" of the information send that the front-end checks for validity. This to detect if the information has not been tampered with (e.g. by mimicking the Cirrus API).