Grading and Results

Grading happens in two passes. When an attempt is submitted, everything that can be scored by machine is scored immediately. Anything that needs a human — essays — is queued for a grader, and the attempt is not considered fully graded until that marking is done.

What the examinee sees, and when, is a separate decision controlled per exam.

Automatic grading

Eight of the nine question types grade themselves at submission.

Partial credit is per question, and follows one of two policies: all or nothing, or proportional. All-or-nothing is the default, so a question awards partial marks only when you ask it to.

Note: blank is not the same as wrong. Next Exams treats 0, "0" and false as real answers rather than emptiness, so a learner who answers zero is recorded as having answered — which matters for progress counts, for the question navigator, and for anyone watching the live monitor.

Manual grading

Essays go to a person.

1. Open Results → Attempts and find the attempt. Attempts awaiting marking are identifiable in the list.
2. Open the attempt and work through its essay responses, awarding points and adding feedback.
3. Save. When no ungraded responses remain, the attempt is finalised and its overall result computed.

Two things happen automatically around this:

• The review stays locked while marking is outstanding. The examinee sees a pending notice, not a partial score. This is deliberate — a half-marked paper is misleading, and a learner who sees one will draw the wrong conclusion.
• An optional email tells you there is work waiting. When an attempt is submitted with essays in it, an administrator notification can be sent. It is off by default.

Marking saves as you type, so there is no separate save step per response.

Rubrics

An essay question can carry a rubric: a list of named criteria, each with its own maximum. The grader then scores each criterion separately, with a note against each, instead of putting one number against the whole answer.

The awarded points are the sum of the criterion scores. If the rubric's total does not match the question's own points, the editor warns you, and grading clamps the result to the question's points rather than letting a mis-specified rubric inflate a score.

Rubrics are optional — an essay with no rubric is marked with a single points field and a comment. Two related settings live alongside the rubric on an essay question: a minimum and maximum word count, shown to the examinee as guidance.

Note: a rubric is a structure for the human marker, not an automatic grader. Nothing in the rubric is scored by machine; it exists to make marking consistent between graders and to show the examinee where the marks went.

Result release

Releasing a result is a per-exam policy, not a global one.

Showing the correct answers is a separate switch. You can publish a score while keeping the paper hidden — useful when the same questions are still in use for other candidates.

Everything on the result page inherits this gating, including the per-exam pass and fail messages, so nothing leaks before release.

What the result page shows

Per-subject breakdown

When an exam covers more than one subject, the result page reports how the examinee did in each one.

• Responses are bucketed by the subject their question belongs to, and points awarded and available are summed per subject.
• Subjects are listed weakest first, so the problem is the first thing read.
• Any subject scoring below the exam's pass mark is flagged Needs review.
• A closing hint names the areas to concentrate on.

The breakdown is skipped when it would say nothing — a single-subject paper adds no information by being split, and questions with no subject are excluded rather than bucketed into an "unknown" row.

Locked review

An exam can lock an attempt's review after it has been seen, so a candidate cannot keep the paper open as a revision aid or share a live rendering of it. Practice attempts are never locked, whatever the exam's policy says.

Exporting results

Attempts can be exported to CSV, filtered exactly as they are on screen — by exam, status and submission date range. The export contains the examinee, exam, status, score, maximum, percentage, pass state, time spent and submission time.

For question-level statistics rather than per-attempt rows, see Analytics and reports.

Access control

An examinee always sees their own result, subject to the release policy, without needing any permission.

See also

• Exam Runner
• Analytics and reports
• Certificates
• Notifications