Release Notes 2022

27 December 2022 - Feature

Candidate review redesign + new features - CR-16973

Introducing a new design for candidate review sessions, including:

• Candidate review now under Menu 'Delivery' instead of 'Marking'
• Create reviews per assessment or per schedule
• New option to show the questions in the same order for fixed forms (with randomized questions)
• Optional usage of Keycodes in candidate review sessions
• Criteria scoring now visible for candidates for Essay and Fileresponse questions
• Added table component to customize your overviews
• New archiving options
• New API's

More information about candidate reviews will be visible here

New report overview of results by candidate - CR-18871

With this new release, you will have an overview to view by: candidate in reports

It will provide one overview with all the candidate results no matter what schedule/assessment.
Especially for those who have only 1 candidate per schedule.

Also inlcuded improved filtering for multiple hierarchies.

Preliminary report as an marking coordinator - CR-19661

Adding a new option in the coordinator overview in marking (only for extended workflow) where you are able to get all preliminary extended candidate results in an excel.
This data allows you to track the progress and scoring of candidates/markers.

13 December 2022 - Maintenance

This release contains:

• Several bugs and improvements in Remarking - CR-19360
• Fix Browser print functionality result overview - CR-19406
• Improve performance on marking submission recalculation job - CR-19668

IPv6 Support

After a successful test phase, see also 10 November 2022 RC below, we plan to roll-out IPv6.
These changes should have no impact at all on your users except Invigilators may see longer IP addresses.

For details, including how to test, see our IPv6 article.

29 November 2022 - Feature

Security: Prevent Username Enumeration - CR-18973

In "Forgotten Password" Cirrus must no longer disclose if the username could be found so will show the same text whether the username was found or not - CR-18973. See OWASP #1, OWASP #2 . The new text will be:

Security: Improved Headers / security.txt / DNSSEC

• No impact on end-users: RFC 9116 security.txt added. - CR-19391
• No impact on end-users: Improve HTTP Response Headers. - CR-18925
• No impact on end-users: Enable DNSSEC. - SYSOPS-456

Performance: Enable caching of CORS requests / TurnItIn throttling

• No impact on end-users except that Cirrus will be a bit faster: Cache your CORS, for performance - CR-18674
• No impact on end-users to even the load on TurnItIn servers Cirrus will not send more than 200 submissions per minute (per region). - CR-19371

Safe Exam Browser 3.4.1 Released for Cirrus

15 November 2022 - Maintenance

Improvements:

• To easen support of Office 365 show more details to a user in case of issues, e.g. because the Office 365 forgot to enable a permission - CR-16479
• Performance optimization for TurnItIn servers by combining EULA data in a submission call - CR-19370

Fixes:

• Fix Result API returns 500 if candidate did not finish attempt - CR-19107
• Financial Statement question blank screen after author saved - CR-19077
• Several bugs and improvements in Remarking - CR-19360
• Score report for candidate is not shown without a click - CR-19381
• Missing answers in marking when sharing candidates/items with other markers - CR-19366

10 November 2022 - RC

1 November 2022 - Feature

TurnItIn Plagiarism Detection for Essay - CR-17469

Thanks to the new integration with TurnItIn's Similarity, Cirrus will now offer fully automated plagiarism detection on essay questions (file response and Office365 questions will be added later, by end Q4 2022).

Please contact our customer success team for information on how to enable this for your organisation.

• TurnItIn added to Customer Sub-Contractors on our List of Sub-Processors page.

Re-marking - CR-14935

Cirrus is pleased to announce that we will release the new and powerful re-marking capability. This feature will enable your organisation to handle candidate appeals for re-evaluation.

View colleague's scoring

We’ve also made several additional improvements connected to the re-marking feature, including the option for markers and moderators to view their colleagues’ scoring.

Read more about Re-marking here.

18 October 2022 - Maintenance Update

(As some features, like TurnItIn, have been postponed this is now a Maintenance update)

• Reimplement FTPS client to resolve export issues - CR-19106
• Enhancement for our own system monitoring (no impact)
• Minor security update of our API JSON parser (no impact)

4 October 2022 - Maintenance Update

We are now back to our normal release schedule which will be the same for all different hostings.

• This release contains security updates. No impact on any functionality.

29 September 2022 - New SLA and DPA

Now that Cirrus is ISO/IEC-27001 certified we have updated our Compliance information and SLA and DPA. In these new versions we have encorporated feedback from both customers and the ISO implementation.

EU hosted Customers - September Major Maintenance

(replaces previous extensive notices now that maintenance has been completed)

20 September 2022 - Maintenance Update

Same as our release on the 6th of September, itwill be different from then our normal release process due to the upcoming maintenance on 23th of September for our EU hosted customers.
This release will be different for EU customers, please read carefully.

Release for only CA, SG AU, EU Premium hosted customers
Allign the Grade to the result when using section pass grade - CR-17740
Minor fixes on Reports> results - CR-18862
Changed translation in usermanagement 'Special needs' > 'Extra time'

These improvement will also go live for EU hosted customers after the planned maintenance of 23 September.

6 September 2022 - Maintenance

This release will be different from then our normal release process due to the upcoming maintenance on 23th of September for our EU hosted customers.
This release will be different for EU customers, please read carefully.

Release for all customers (CA, SG, AU, EU hosted customers)

• Improvement: Assessment Dialog window component will have a scroll - CR-18598
• Bugfix: for Creatio integration with Proctorio - CR-18876

Release for only CA, SG AU hosted customers

• Feature: Removing Learning objectives and Topics for candidate resuls excel export only when 'Limited reports permission is turned on' - CR-18705
• Bugfix: When using a assessment time span, a schedule will use the same wrong time - CR-18502
• Bugfix: Blueprint - Assessment type:random. Does not include newly added items in the collection after publishing - CR-18703

These improvement will also go live for EU hosted customers after the planned maintenance of 23 September.

23 August 2022 Feature

INTRODUCING: RE-MARKING

Re-marking is a new feature that makes it possible to re-evaluate published results of individual candidates. Typically after results have been released and a candidate makes an appeal.

This functionality will be rolled out step by step and is fully available in Q4 2022 (CR-14935).

First 3 steps

We are pleased to announce the first 3 steps that are included in our August 23 release (CR-17813):

1. A complete new table design.
2. An updated and vastly improved Results screen in Reports.
3. In an effort to streamline processes within Cirrus we moved the Audit tab to Reports.

New table component

With this release, you will be introduced to a completely new table design. This table component is a blueprint for how tables throughout the platform will look and behave.

The new tables allows you to customize your columns you would like to see.
It includes better ordering, sorting, filtering, searching etc. In short, a better way to manage your content more personally.

Audit tab will be removed

Please be aware that the Audit tab in Marking will be completly removed after this release.

Impact on Roles > Site Roles

• Site role: Marking > 'View audit tab' will be removed
• Site Role: Marking > 'View proctored recorderd' will be moved from Marking to 'General'
• Site Role: Reports > 'View score report (always)' will be moved from Reports to 'General'

Shortly we will release part 2 of the Remarking story, which includes enhancements to reports, as well as the possibility to re-mark scripts already published to candidates. For example in case of appeals.

Safe Exam Browser update

9 August 2022 Maintenance

Improvements:

• Increased recording time (to 40 sec) on rich text editor for answering as spoken text in a essay question - CR-18637
• Improved QTI import based on LMS Blackboard QTI export - CR-18427
  • Added marking scheme
  • images/video's
  • General feedback

Bugs:

• File Transfer PDF export is missing decimals - CR-18640
• [User Api] Permissions not set correctly - CR-18647

26 July 2022 Maintenance

Improvements:

• Improvement on PIN logic in candidate delivery - CR-18162
  When a candidate is waiting to receive the pincode and the scheduler deactivates the schedule, the candidate will not be affected by this last-minute change.

Bugs:

• Score report tab is not shown if tables are empty - **CR-18466

Non-EU Customers - July Major Maintenance

12 July 2022 Feature

Features

• Cirrus-Blackboard integration via LTI 1.3 Advantage. General Available (GA) after we succesfully concluded our testing in June. See LTI documentation - Blackboard (SYSOPS-269) - CR-17397
• NEW API: Invigilation screen external API. See Developer Portal - Invigilation Info - CR-18302

28 June 2022 Maintenance

Bugs:

• Time display in correct in 'candidate result' excel export - CR-17676
• Error 500 in response to PATCH integrations/external/schedule/*** - CR-18310
• Various performance improvements.

21 June 2022 Hotfix

A minimal impact release of a hotfix that fix an issue introduced with the June 14th release where in special scenario's the score report isn't shown for an author under reporting. A new site role permission "View score report (always)" will be added which allows to always show the score report in the reports- CR-18483

16 June 2022 Hotfix

A minimal impact release of a hotfix that will fix a regression in our Get Results API (/results) where it returns an error in some configurations [CR-18475].

14 June 2022 Feature

Features

• Score reports: show score report options for author according to assessment options- CR-17602
  Untill so far the assessment options "Result" only affected the candidates experience. However with this improvement will also improve the authoring page candidate result - score report.

Bugs:

• Align schedule title between the header and with the settings dialog - CR-18340
• Let assessor decide marking coordinator: Candidate is shown in wrong Filter by when marker set score and remove it - CR-17188

31 May 2022 Maintenance

Features:

• Score Report: Redesign/improvements to the score report print version - CR-17507
• Various minor performance improvements.

17 May 2022 Feature

Bugs

• Various performance improvements.
• Improved support for Safari, including bugfix for setting date or time while scheduling an assessment - CR-18166
• Other bug fixes may follow.

3 May 2022 Maintenance

Bugs:

• Several minor fixed on Score report (grades) - CR-17982
• If keycode is 'off' on schedule level > show warning on invigilation dashboard when printing keycode slips - CR-18035
• Pincode cannot be set by api when schedule is activated - CR-18224

Feature/UI
~~* Score Report: Redesign Print version - CR-17507

19 April 2022 Maintenance

Bugs:

• Schedule redesign bug-fixes/Improvements - CR-18145
  Highlights:

  • Cannot choose correct schedule hiearachy - CR-18163
  • Duplicate hierarchies - CR-18102
  • Pre-fill the schedule title with assessment title - CR-18143
  • Pincode is generatated automaticly - CR-18158
  • Assessment option 'Hide options during scheduling' disabled by default - CR-18159

• Marking coordinator > Allocation tab not loading for schedule with status 'Assessor needed' - CR-17980

• Assessment > Blueprint Translations corrected - CR-18169

• Word count displaying incorrectly in marker/moderation screen - CR-18059

• Various textual improvements for the Dutch language - CR-18169

08 April 2022 Hotfix

See Hotfix on our status page.

5 April 2022 Feature

Feature/UI

• Improved add schedule dialog - CR-16781
  A redesign of adding a schedule including:

  • Activating proctorio template/options per schedule - CR-16783
    On February 8, we released the option to setup multiple Proctorio templates via the admin. Now it will be possible to select one of these templates on a schedule level. More on this via our proctorio article

  • Activating Keycode per schedule - CR-16374
    On 22 Februari we already released the keycode functionality, however now it will be possible to choose which schedule shoulde be setup with a keycode. More on keycode

• Schedule dashboard with checklist - CR-16784
  Cirrus will introduce a new schedule overview screen consistant with the assessment overview. The overview gives an overview of the specific schedule settings and which steps needs to be taken. Also a new menu (consistant with assessment) will appear via the 3 vertical dots an the top right side containing.

• Schedule activation redesign - CR-16785
  The activation window is redesign and the 'to do list' is moved to the schedule overview tab.

• Creatio: 3.1 "Void" cancels Candidate in Cirrus - CR-14833

Bugs

• Unable to add clusters AVAILABLE FOR SCHEDULING BY - CR-17793
• Delivery > Completed tab: N/A is shown for Grade column - CR-17974
• Correct answers not shown in candidate review and audit tab for Multiple Response question - CR-18031
• Print version shows to much question when having Lo's from different subjects - CR-17811

22 March 2022 Maintenance

Feature:

• Creatio integration: Implemented Voiding via Creatio- CR-14833

Bugfixes

• Unable to add clusters AVAILABLE FOR SCHEDULING BY for assessment options - CR-17793

15 March 2022 Hotfix

See Hotfix on our status page.

08 March 2022 Maintenance

UI

• Administrator UI - Integrations section renamed "INTEGRATIONS" (was "WEBSERVICES"), and removed obsolete LIS Integrations ("Integrations") that was phased out in 2019 for our REST API - CR-17472

Features:

• Grades in Score report & result page- CR-17506
  • Assessment option renamed "Show result outcome" (was "Show Pass/Fail outcome")
  • Assessment option renamed "Show passing percentage" (was "Show summary metrics to candidates")
  • Assessment option added "Show Grade"
  • Blue metric widgets on result screen removed
  • New section overview on result page for candidate and author. By default will show "Percentage" and "overall score" shown.
• LTI Improvements: new Admin UI for LTI Configuration and improved LTI Support for Blackboard - CR-14784, CR-17397
• Performance improvements by enabling caching of CORS requests (should further optimize the responsiveness of Cirrus especially on slow connections) - CR-17724
• Cirrus-Creatio integration - making 'site' optional - CR-17792
• Performance improvements in post-exam processing (no functional impact) - CR-17679, CR-17713, CR-17712

Bugfixes:

• Accessibility issues when viewing feedback per question from the Result page - CR-17630
• • Reading screen elements from score report per Topic - CR-17631, CR-17650

22 February 2022 Feature

Features:

• Cirrus is introducing a new and easier way of onboarding candidates to an exam: keycodes. A keycode login consists of an 8 digit code that candidates can use to easily and secure access their exams.
  NOTE: Keycodes is an extra feature that will not replace the current login. Logging in with username and password is also still possible.
  This release will mainly include the API functionality. Read more about this new feature here. - CR-16374
• At the request of one of our customers, the formula editor has been extended with more Greek characters. Namely: lowercase variants of kappa, rho, phi and uppercase Lambda, Sigma and Omega. - CR-16970
• When creating or editing items in Cirrus, the auto correction functionality of the integrated WebSpellChecker was switched on by default. This release will change that to >> switched off by default. - CR-17677

Bugfixes:

• Certain punctuation marks could, in exceptional cases, break a CIP question. This has been fixed. - CR-17655
• Blank screen in author mode after release - CR-17491
• Candidates unable to access review sessions without a time span - CR-17603
• Unable to export candidate results (Only for SG hosting) - CR-17636
• Moderator not visible + detailed results not visible in the audit tab - CR-17743
• [Delivery > Result tab ] After clicking on question > candidate was redirected on Login page - CR-17720
• Impossible to start exam if edit schedule (update schedule) via external api - CR-17651
• Reliability/Performance: Learning objectives - CR-17050

08 February 2022 Maintenance

UI:

• Subject needed a different Dutch translation than Topic. Both were "Onderwerp" in the Dutch translation, the lesser used Subject term is now translated as "Vakgebied" - CR-17660

Features:

• Proctorio settings templates - CR-16783
  This new feature allows for creating multiple templates with Proctorio settings. These templates can be set up in the Admin panel of Cirrus (Admin > Global Settings > Proctorio).
  When creating a new schedule, the scheduler can choose one of the template via our API. Choosing a template via our UI will be released later in 2022.

• External API: Proctorio settings on Schedule level CR16782
  Cirrus improved the external API with proctorio activation and templates. Also see our previous enhancement. The following calls are extended:

  • Create schedule and generate links
  • Create Non published schedule
  • Update schedule

Bugfixes:

• Score report bugs - CR-17421
• External API: Patch marking settings error change if assessor cannot be found - CR-16045
• While submitting an exam students got the message you answered 12 of the 0 questions - CR-17572

31 January 2022 - New SLA and DPA

25 January 2022 Feature

Features:

• Safe Exam Browser: Restore integrity check by Implement Javascript Key Check. - CR-15822

• Voiding functionality - default visible but disabled - CR-17095
  The Voiding feature, see Marking > Voiding attempts, introduced in November 2021 might be easily missed by customers as the related permission needs granted. For improved change management from now on the "Void attempt(s)" button will always be visible yet disabled for markers without the permission that instead get a explanatory tooltip "Please request your Admin to allow this permission for your role.".
• Extended Match question type options - With polytomous scoring, default option changed to 'equal to correct options' - CR-17270
• Anonymization of candidate exam results (Engine+API only!) - This release contains a new technical feature to unlink candidates from exams. More info in our Anonymization of candidate exam results article. - CR-16886

Bugfixes:

• Assessment > Settings dialog: Possible to add hierarchy if a cluster with the same hierachies was already added - CR-17426
• Candidates see wrong time zone information in notification email - CR-17410
• Published exams remain on Assess Tab forever (after schedule window is closed) - CR-16822
• Performance enhancement Office365 when Office365 is not used - CR-17233
• Office365: Unable to open a file when created a new version without office file - CR-16424
• Option to rename topic to a deleted topic name - CR-17284
• Incorrect percentage shown on result tab when not using decimals in rounding rules - CR-17365

11 January 2022 Maintenance

Bugfixes:

• Not possible to enter Review session after time span ended - CR-14936
• When no 'exit url' for candidate set results in some cases 'page not found' after taking exam - CR-17065
• Possible to add only hierarchies/cluster which belongs to user(scheduled by) in Assessment - CR-17032
• Answer value in CIP-question switches automatically when using distractors - CR-17319
• General bug fixes: Manage topics in collections - CR-17395
• UI changes: Score report options config in Assessment > Options - CR-17396
• Voided results will not include calculation Mean and Median and average - CR-17428

Update to Release Process