Optime Exam, a powerful examination planning and automated scheduling solution

Produce fully scheduled and resourced examination timetables with Exam, our advanced auto-scheduling solution.

Intelligent auto planning and scheduling

Exam’s cutting-edgeAI-based scheduling engine helps you achieve fast, flexible and accurate timetabling solutions.

And also provides the ability to model the delivery of examination sessions of varying constraints, multiple times per year.

Planning to publishing to delivery

Exam supports the full scheduling process. From the import of students enrolment to exam delivery, including invigilation management and attendance monitoring.

Draft publishing is also supported and can be shared with different stakeholders across multiple locations, with notifications of changes.

Putting students first

Exam principally has student satisfaction in mind. Each student profile is considered to create the best personal exam schedule possible for all, including seating plans and accessibility or alternative requirements.

Schedules built around constraints

Exam helps ensure schedules work around your invigilator and venue capacities.

Invigilators
Exam uses constraints and a survey tool to reach ideal invigilator schedules designed around their availability and workload.

Venues
Various room properties such as fitting, utilisation, splitting and proximity are considered when creating schedules.

Decision support

Gain assistance to maintain optimum Exam schedules:

Violation Alert
Fix clashes in your live schedule by altering highlighted violations (including rooms, staff, groups, students, courses and modules). Users are also alerted if they attempt to introduce a new event with a violation.

Suggestions
Exam suggests new solutions when making changes to seating allocations, invigilator schedules or time and venue changes.

‍

Import, export and build the Exam model

Exam checks data validation on import to ensure it is complete, accurate and ready for scheduling. Make data edits at anytime via a very rich data management tool with bulk editing.

Quickly and easily build models from your data at regular times of the year. There is also built-in reporting to bring further meaning to your data.

See all Exam's Capabilities

Optime Support

The Optime Support Centre is your portal to gain fast technical assistance from our team. You also have access to our self-help knowledge base covering topics such as getting started and FAQs.

Learn More

Get Support

Capabilities

Exam helps you achieve fast and flexible schedules that work for all

Key functions

Smart Scheduling

Exam’s event, venue and invigilator setup makes scheduling as simple and flexible as possible. Examination sessions can be based on previous deliveries or created quickly from scratch.

Automation

Exam’s cutting-edge AI-based scheduling engine helps you achieve fast, flexible and accurate scheduling solutions. The engine produces clash-free, student-centric exam schedules within seconds, with invigilator assignments and seating plan allocations.

Decision Support

Exam helps sustain optimum solutions by analysing all aspects of your draft schedules, alerting to any clashes or violations which can be created during manual adjustments. It also provides visual and informative advice to maintain or improve the quality of the examination schedule for students.

Constraints

Setting constraints informs Exam and the automatic scheduling engine of all the preferences and requirements for the examination delivery, including student satisfaction and resource availability. This includes specific considerations such as individual student needs and invigilator workloads.

Data Gathering

Exam facilitates the gathering of availability and workload preferences from Invigilators, which feeds directly into the constraints considered by the automation engine.

Publishing Notifications

Examination schedules can be published to students and invigilators. They can also be notified of this and any other future changes to venue or times.

Exam Schedules

Violation Alert

Constraints Editor

Additional features

Alternative Requirements

A wide range of personalised requirements can be easily defined for individual students. These are considered during the automated scheduling process and reflect in the timetable produced. These include additional time, breaks, separate rooms, equipment and assistance. Invigilators can also be notified where appropriate.

Invigilator Scheduling

Exam provides full control over the invigilator requirements for each exam or venue, providing multiple options for managing the automatic allocation of invigilators and teams. This includes specifying numbers based on exam size or venue capacity, specific roles and required specialties and individual invigilator preferences such as their availability.

Seating Plan Management

Exam also provides full and managed automatic seat allocation for students in venues as part of the scheduling process. All room layouts can be modelled with rules set on how the engine should fill seats, including consideration for minimising disruption to students when exams of varying duration are sharing venues.

Attendance

Full support for invigilator monitoring of student attendance and identity checking, with quick and easy to use visual attendance marking collected for subsequent reporting, analysis and auditing.

Reporting

Specific reports and exports, including invigilator instructions, attendance registers, cover sheets, schedule information are provided in Exam. Also, the powerful Reporting Dashboard provides access to a variety of statistical reports, including visualisation of user defined quality metrics.

Seating Management

Exam Editor

Attendance Tracking

Enhancing user
experience

Intuitive User Interface

Exam is designed to be powerful but easy to use, guiding you through the full scheduling process and providing clear and understandable visual guidance. There is also a help tool and full documentation should you ever need assistance.

Multi-User Role-Based Capabilities

Set up for single or multiple users, team-based on delegated across your organisation. Includes roles for students, staff and invigilators.

Mobile Devices

Examination schedules are easily accessible using mobile devices, including smart attendance monitoring on tablet devices. Giving you the freedom to access timetable data from anywhere.

Accessibility

Fully WCAG 2.1 compliant, providing an accessible experience for a broader audience ability.

Technology

Setup and Configuration

Intuitive and flexible tools for on-boarding data and users, as well as a high level of configurability including branding, terminology and language support.

Cloud-Based Web Application

Easily distributable cloud-based web application reduces the load on your local network infrastructure and support team.

Performance

From the general user interface for viewing timetables to complex scheduling processes and high-volume usage, the system utilises in-built caching and elastic scaling to ensure a consistently reactive experience for the end-user.

Security

End-to-end encryption is employed for all data traffic and personal account security, including full GDPR compliance.

Interfacing and API

Optime’s flexible Application Programming Interface (API), allows Placement data to be interfaced with other applications or hardware. These capabilities are extensive and fully documented.