Exam & Gradebook Studio A Teacher's Operating Manual

1 Orientation

How the Studio is organised

The Studio is a single workspace divided into ten numbered tabs that run left to right in the order of a normal teaching cycle: set up your details → build your classes → create an exam → deliver it → collect and mark results → print reports. You rarely need every tab in one sitting; most days you will live in three or four of them.

2 Access

Signing in & your account

The Studio is cloud-backed, so your classes, exams, submissions and gradebook follow you to any device once you sign in. The first time you arrive you will create a teacher account.

1. Open the Studio link. If you do not have an account yet, choose Create Teacher Account and register with your email and a password (minimum six characters), or use Sign in with Google.
2. On later visits, sign in with the same email and password. Forgotten it? Use Forgot password? and the Studio emails you a reset link.
3. When you are connected you will see Online · signed in and your email in the dashboard header.

3 Tab 1

Setup — the things you set once

Setup holds the details that cascade as defaults into every exam, every printout and every student-facing screen. The intention is that you fill it in at the start of the year and then leave it alone.

• School & teacher details — your name and school appear on landing screens, gradebook reports and access cards. School name, emirate and teacher name are now required; the Arabic versions of your name and school are optional. The emirate is chosen from a dropdown of the seven UAE emirates.
• Deployment link & exam code base — the public address students use to reach the Studio. Leave the link blank to use the current page automatically; set it explicitly only if you preview on one address but publish on another.
• Default exam duration — any value from 1–300 minutes, used as the starting timer for each new exam.
• Default warnings before disqualification — 1–5. This is how many times a student may switch away from the exam tab before the exam ends early (see §9).

The Setup tab also contains short reference panels — Five-minute setup, How students reach an exam, Browser support, and Backup discipline — worth reading once.

4 Tab 2

Classes & Rosters

Before you can deliver an exam you need at least one class with students in it. A class carries a number prefix that the Studio uses when generating exam numbers, so each class can have its own tidy numbering.

1. Use ＋ Add class and give it a clear name (e.g. Grade 10 — Section B).
2. Add students one of three ways: ＋ Add student row for a few by hand, 📋 Paste roster to drop in a list, or 📂 Upload CSV/TSV for a whole class at once.
3. Give each student an exam number — the anonymous identifier they will type to sit an exam. Use ⊞ Auto-generate missing to fill any blanks automatically.
4. Run ✓ Validate exam numbers. The Studio warns you if a number is reused in another class so you can fix it before exam day.

5 Tab 3

Create Exam — building by hand

This is where you compose an exam from scratch, mixing any of the available question types. You can build quietly: an exam stays a private draft until you set it to a published status, at which point assigned classes can see it.

Step order inside the tab

1. Choose the class(es) that will sit the exam — students only ever see exams assigned to their class. A toggle lets you open the exam to all classes, or you can limit it.
2. Name the exam and set its code. The exam code is the public identifier students type: 3–32 characters, letters, digits, hyphens and underscores only. Add an optional description and instructions shown on the landing screen.
3. Set the rules — duration, warnings before disqualification, runner language (English or Arabic), and the integrity toggles below.
4. Add questions with ＋ Add question ▾ and reorder them with ▲/▼.

The question types

Recommended: 6–12 questions makes a balanced exam. Use the Info text / passage block for reading material or scenarios that later questions refer to — it is worth zero marks and carries no answer.

Integrity & scoring toggles

• Instant scoring on — the student sees their auto-marked score the moment they submit. Off — the result is submitted quietly to you (use this for formal exams).
• Block copy/paste and Block printing on the student page reduce casual cheating.
• Warnings before disqualification ends an exam early after too many tab-switches.

6 Tab 4

AI Exam Builder — three steps

If you would rather draft a reading-comprehension exam with an AI assistant, this tab gives you a reliable pipeline: prompt → paste → commit.

1. Generate the prompt. Press 🪄 Generate AI prompt. The Studio writes a strict instruction telling the AI to reply with exactly four labelled blocks: [TITLE] [PASSAGE] [QUESTIONS] [ANSWERS]. Copy it into your AI assistant of choice.
2. Paste the output. Bring the four-block reply back, paste it into the text area, and press ↻ Parse content. A live 👁 Preview shows what was understood.
3. Commit. Review the parsed exam, assign it to your classes, and save. From there it behaves exactly like a hand-built exam — editable in Tab 3.

7 Tab 5

Exam Manager & sharing

The Exam Manager is the home for every exam you have built. From here you can:

• Edit — jumps back to Tab 3 with that exam loaded.
• Share — the Share panel hands you a direct link and a QR code for each exam. When a student opens the link (or scans the QR), they land on the exam and authenticate with their exam number — never their name.
• Delete — permanently removes the exam. Any results that referenced it become orphaned, so delete with care.

The exam code in the link is the same code you set in Tab 3, so you can also simply tell students the code verbally and let them enter it at the Student Portal.

8 Tab 6

Preview before you publish

Preview lets you walk through an exam exactly as a student will — the landing screen, the question runner, and the integrity layer (visible but non-enforcing) — without saving any result. It opens in a new tab so you can flip between your dashboard and the student view freely.

Use it as your final check: confirm the questions read clearly, the marks add up, and the instructions make sense before any student touches the real thing.

9 The student side

What students experience

It helps to know exactly what your students see, so you can brief them in thirty seconds.

Integrity in action

While the exam is open, switching away from the tab increments a visible warnings counter. After the limit you set, the exam ends early with an "Exam ended early" screen — but their work is preserved for you to review, not destroyed. Students are told plainly that repeated incidents may disqualify the exam.

"Already submitted"

Each student may sit an exam once. If they return, they see an Already Submitted screen and are asked to speak to you. To let them sit it again, you issue a retry code from Attempt Control (§12).

10 Tab 7

Gradebook & marking

Submissions arrive here automatically while you are signed in — there is no import step. The Gradebook is a matrix of students down the side and exams across the top, so you can read one class across many exams at once.

• Mark the open-ended questions. Anything auto-scorable is already done; open-ended items wait for your manual mark, and the final total updates as you enter them.
• Add teacher notes against any cell using the ✎ note button (it turns to 📝 once a note exists).
• Toggle names on or off for your own viewing comfort; the underlying data stays anonymous.
• Export raw data with ⤓ Export CSV or a full ⤓ Export class JSON backup.

Choosing which columns to show

Open the ⚙ Columns control above the matrix to decide exactly which columns appear. You can show or hide the row number, exam number, student name, Arabic name, the exam score columns, and the summary columns — Average, Total, Highest, Lowest, Progress, Done and Status. Tick or untick as many as you like, or use Show all columns to bring them back.

Class Analytics

Beneath the matrix you get a visual summary: class average per exam, a trend line across the exams you select (pick at least two to see a trend), and a score distribution across all cells. Exams made only of passages have no scorable questions, so analytics will not appear for them.

11 Tab 8

Print Center

The Print Center produces clean A4 portrait documents, ready to print or save as PDF. Two main outputs:

• Gradebook reports for the staff room — pick a class, tick the exams to include, and generate. The report shows exactly the columns you selected with the Gradebook's ⚙ Columns control (see §10), and switches automatically to landscape when the table is wide. With two or more classes the report breaks into sections, one per class. A space is left blank for handwritten comments.
• QR access cards to hand out to students — each card carries the QR that opens the exam. Optional toggles add the class name, a personalised exam number per card, and an integrity footnote.

12 Tab 9

Attempt Control & retries

This tab manages second attempts. You must be signed in for it to unlock.

1. Choose the class, then the exam, then the exam number. The current attempt-lock state for that combination appears below.
2. Generate a retry code (it looks like MM-RETRY-7KQ4) and give it to the student.
3. The student enters it on the Already Submitted screen and may sit the exam once more.

13 Tab 10

Data & Privacy

The final tab is your safety net and your housekeeping.

• Export a full snapshot — ⤓ Export snapshot downloads a single JSON file with your classes, rosters, exams, submissions, attempts and gradebook. This is ideal for an end-of-year archive or as compliance evidence. The export reflects exactly what is loaded in your dashboard at that moment.
• Danger Zone — clears only this device's preferences (dismissed banners, on-screen state, the device action log). Your classes, exams, submissions, attempts and gradebook are not affected.

14 Reference

Troubleshooting

A sensible rhythm

1. Fill in Setup once at the start of the year.
2. Build your Classes & Rosters at the start of each term.
3. For each assessment: create (Tab 3 or 4), preview (Tab 6), then share (Tab 5).
4. After the exam: mark the open-ended items and read analytics (Tab 7).
5. When you need paper or PDF: Print Center (Tab 8). At year-end: export a snapshot (Tab 10).