Set up a simulation as an exam (hide feedback & edit grades)

To run a simulation as an exam, give it the Exam purpose. The purpose hides the feedback report from learners and locks it hidden, so you, the instructor, can review and edit each learner's grades, summary and criterion feedback before you decide what, if anything, they see.

There are two steps: set the simulation up, then grade the results.

Step 1 — Set the purpose to Exam

  1. In the simulation editor, open General Info.
  2. Under What this station is for, choose Exam.
  3. In the Switch this station to Exam? dialog, review the changes and click Apply.
  4. Click Save, then share the simulation with your learners as usual.

The Exam purpose turns off, and locks, everything that would hand results to the examinee or help them during the run:

  • The Realtime Guide is off.
  • The processing chat after the run (the Feedback Chat) is off, with its tab and its stage.
  • The learner's report is hidden: Show to learner on the Report Display page is off.
  • Allow PDF download is off, so the learner can't export a report they are not shown.

Grades default to numbers, for each criterion and overall. You can change that on the Report Display page. For the full comparison of purposes, and how Exam differs from Screening, see Choose a simulation's purpose.

Leave Advanced Privacy off (on the Access & Privacy page). Advanced Privacy hides the details from instructors too and turns off grade editing, so it works against what you want here.

To lock the learner's computer to the exam while they take it, see Run an exam in Safe Exam Browser.

Hide only part of the assessment

If you want learners to see their report but not every criterion, don't use the Exam purpose. Leave the report on and hide individual criteria instead: each criterion has an eye toggle that keeps it out of the learner's report, PDF, feedback chat and LMS grade comment while you still see it. See Feedback Instructions.

Step 2 — Edit grades, summary and criterion feedback

After a learner finishes, open their report from the space that holds the exam (see Where to see your participants' results). Because the report is hidden from learners, you see an Edit Report button at the top of the report. It appears only for the people who manage the space: its instructor, space admins and editors, and your organization's admins.

Click Edit Report to adjust:

  • The Overall Performance grade
  • The written summary
  • Each criterion's grade and feedback

Click Save Changes when you are done, or Cancel to discard. A report you have changed is marked with an Edited badge, and Restore Original brings back the AI's original evaluation at any time.

Release results

An exam report is written to the examinee, so it is ready to hand back once you have reviewed it. To show learners their reports, change the purpose to Not set. (Choosing Training or Assessment instead also changes the grade display to that purpose's default, which hides the numeric grades.) In the dialog, tick Show the participant their report again, and tick Let the participant download the PDF again if they should download it too. Then click Apply and Save.

Showing the report to learners turns editing off: Edit Report disappears while learners can see the report.

Good to know

  • The Edit Report button only appears when the report is hidden from learners and Advanced Privacy is off. The Exam purpose takes care of the first; you control the second.
  • Only the people who manage the space can edit a report. Learners can never edit their own.
  • Switching an existing simulation to Exam also hides the report from learners who ran it earlier. Their runs and evaluations are kept.
  • A simulation that asks for a debrief still collects it: the learner writes it before the run completes, even with the report hidden, and you read it on the report's Debrief tab.
  • Your edits replace the AI's evaluation in the report that you and your instructors see.

In this series

  1. The simulation editor, explained
  2. Create a simulation with AI
  3. General settings
  4. Simulation Display
  5. Simulation Instructions
  6. Feedback Instructions
  7. The debrief
  8. Formatting content with Markdown
  9. Best practices & troubleshooting
  10. Set up a simulation as an exam (you are here)
  11. Enable & configure the Realtime Guide
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