Next-Gen Assessment Engine & Academic Integrity Platform
CYVERRA engineered a scalable, cloud-native digital examination and grading engine to modernise assessment delivery across multi-faculty campuses. The solution unified high-stakes testing orchestration, academic integrity telemetry, and automated gradebook reconciliation.
Multi-Campus Research University Network
- 5x
- Concurrent session capacity
- -62%
- Marking turnaround time
- 0 hrs
- Exam-period system downtime
- -45%
- Administrative grading effort
The Challenge
The university network experienced severe operational strain across 14 faculties and 65,000 enrolled students during peak examination cycles. Legacy, disparate testing software struggled under high concurrent load, frequently causing mid-session timeouts, state synchronisation failures, and elevated support ticket volumes during high-stakes finals. Academic integrity controls and post-assessment grading workflows were severely fractured. Departmental staff depended on manual spreadsheet transfers and fragmented proctoring tools to moderate exams and push grades into the core student information system (SIS), resulting in grading cycles that often stretched beyond four weeks. In addition, strict data sovereignty regulations and mandatory WCAG 2.1 AA accessibility standards required an architectural overhaul, necessitating a high-availability, fully auditable platform that could operate seamlessly across diverse student devices and campus locations.
Our Approach
CYVERRA designed and developed a bespoke, cloud-native assessment platform leveraging an event-driven microservices architecture. The core engine decoupled test authoring, real-time question delivery, telemetry ingestion, and evaluation workflows to guarantee zero-downtime scalability during sudden traffic spikes of over 25,000 concurrent active examinees. A dedicated integrity subsystem was engineered directly into the runtime environment, providing client-side resilience, automated offline state caching, and privacy-compliant anomaly detection without relying on intrusive third-party plugins. Real-time telemetry was streamed via high-throughput message brokers into an isolated grading workspace that supported collaborative, rubric-based evaluation and double-blind marking. To ensure enterprise interoperability, CYVERRA implemented bi-directional API connectors with the existing SIS, enabling continuous synchronisation of enrolment rosters, accommodations, and certified final marks, supported by automated CI/CD deployment pipelines and comprehensive stress testing.
The Outcome
The assessment engine successfully processed multiple full-scale examination cycles with zero exam-period downtime, accommodating high-concurrency testing across all faculties without performance degradation. Automated distribution and rubric-driven marking accelerated grade finalisation by 62%, eliminating manual data transfers. Institutional compliance with regional data governance and accessibility mandates was fully restored, while student confidence in the examination process improved substantially. Administrative overhead across central IT and faculty examination boards decreased by nearly half.
Technology used
- React
- Go
- Node.js
- PostgreSQL
- Apache Kafka
- Kubernetes
- Redis
- AWS
CYVERRA delivered an assessment platform that proved completely resilient under peak examination loads while drastically cutting our administrative turnaround.