Online exams at scale: how to create a strong operations schedule

When you run major online exam events with thousands of students, delivering a smooth test experience is top priority. It also happens to be incredibly challenging.

Multiple teams, vendors, technologies and timelines must come together in perfect harmony. And at the centre of it all sits one critical piece of infrastructure: a meticulous, end-to-end operations schedule.

As Geraldine Stringer, Digital Program Manager at Australian Science Innovations (ASI), puts it:

A comprehensive schedule helps you orchestrate every activity, deadline, dependency and hand-off involved in delivering a major online exam event. It acts as both your roadmap and your safety net, ensuring nothing slips through the cracks – even when dozens of teams are involved.

What an effective operations schedule includes for major online exams

A well-structured schedule breaks down the entire exam cycle into clear chronological phases. Each phase includes its own tasks, time estimates, owners and dependencies.

These are the typical phases your operations schedule will cover, with carried out concurrently.

1. Secure and coordinate suppliers

Major online exams can require many external suppliers whose services are essential. This may include your exam platform provider, assessment writers, printing services and others, whose deliverables should be confirmed (or re-confirmed) months in advance to ensure everything is ready for your big exam days.

2. Give staff access to your online exam platform

Your online assessment platform typically acts as the hub of your large exam events, where you complete every aspect of testing. So, everyone involved in the end-to-end exam process – assessment authors, invigilators, markers, data analysts and more – need logins and training to ensure they can access the system and do their jobs effectively.

3. Author your assessment content

Question and test authoring can be one of the largest aspects of your assessment cycle – often a project within a project. It requires its own workflow or sub-schedule to ensure authorship, reviews, quality assurance and publishing all happen on time.

4. Market the exam

If your assessments are sold commercially, like our  ICAS competition, your marketing team will need to arrange promotional campaigns like eDMs, adverts, social media posts and website updates, properly timed and coordinated to ensure as many registrations as possible.

5. Update key documentation

Processes, procedures and other supporting documentation are essential tools for helping staff carry out their roles. In some instances, they’ll create and maintain the documents themselves, allowing other team members to pick up their work when required.

It’s crucial to update these documents with any process changes – particularly big ones like switching to another assessment platform.

6. Prepare communications to institutions or candidates

If you run your own online exam events, you’ll need to prepare clear communications for the students or candidates taking their tests, including dates, locations and other important exam information. And you’ll also need to be prepared to answer their queries promptly and accurately – particularly if the assessments are high-stakes, when candidates may be anxious.

If another institution or partner runs your exam events for you, similarly, you’ll need to help them communicate clearly with students or candidates and ensure they have all the crucial information they need for a successful exam day.

7. Manage student enrolments

Whether you’re enrolling students manually, enabling self-registration or supporting institutions with their own enrolments, this needs careful sequencing and validation to ensure that every student can enrol successfully, and with the least amount of stress.

8. Validate data

Data is one of the most time-consuming things to get right with large-scale exams, because there’s so much of it. Student data, assessment data, school data – it must be checked and re-checked to ensure it’s as accurate as possible, helping avoid any hiccups on exam day.

9. Test, re-test and repeat

When your online assessments are built and exams set up ready to be delivered, it’s important to run through the tests weeks in advance to ensure all are working as expected. Then as the exam window gets closer, check again – and again on the day itself. Time permitting, every round of testing reduces the risk of exam day issues that little more.

John Lu from Janison – who helps deliver around 300,000 ICAS tests each year – really emphasises the importance of system testing:

10. Deliver the exam event

For the big day(s), you’ll need to thoroughly prepare for the live monitoring, support workflows, escalation pathways, contingency plans, and other key aspects to ensure your staff are fully prepared to carry out a successful online exam event.

The right approach to building your schedule?

There’s no single right way to build an operations schedule. Some people map tasks forward from day one. Others, like John Lu, start at the finish line and work backwards.

By starting with the exam date and planning in reverse, he ensures every dependency is considered and every milestone is realistic.

Choose the format that works for your team

While your large-scale online exams are naturally complex, the format of your operations schedule doesn’t have to be. You may create everything in:

• Simple Word documents or spreadsheets
• A Gantt chart with dependencies
• A dedicated project management tool

What matters is that it includes every phase, task, deadline and owner — and that it leads your team step-by-step toward a successful exam event.