Cambridge on-screen exam preparation: 7 ways to get ready

Cambridge is moving some IGCSE and A-Level exams on-screen. Your students know the content, but if the first time they see the digital format is on exam day, they lose marks to the screen instead of the questions. The good news is that getting ready is simple, and you can start this term.

Cambridge on-screen exam preparation means letting students practise and sit mocks in the same digital format they will use on exam day, so the screen feels normal before the real thing. Do that well and the exam stops being about the tool and goes back to being about what they know.

Here are seven practical ways to get there. None of them add to your marking pile.

TL;DR. Getting ready for on-screen exams

1. Start on-screen practice early, not in exam term

Start early. Students who only meet the digital format in their final mock spend that mock learning the screen instead of showing what they know.

The fix is small and regular. Set short on-screen quizzes from the start of the course, not one big digital paper at the end. A Year 11 IGCSE class doing a five-minute on-screen retrieval quiz each week will walk into the real exam and feel nothing new. A class that only switches format a fortnight before will not.

With AssessPrep you can build these quizzes instantly or access the ready-made question bank so early practice costs you almost no extra time. You can author on-screen practice questions for any subject.

The screen should feel boring by exam day, not new.

That familiarity is the base. Next, make sure they can actually drive the screen.

2. Get students comfortable with the screen tools

Teach students how to use the tools before testing them on the content, such as split-screen viewing, a built-in notepad, a highlighter, and zooming capabilities, along with options for answering using bullet points, bold, and italic text. Include accessibility features such as background colors, line height, and font size (for essay responses), and utilize closed captions or video transcripts for multimedia components.

These are all built into the Cambridge digital exam interface, and Cambridge provides a demonstration test so students can try them before exam day.

Take a Biology data question or a History source. On paper, students glance across the page. On screen, they scroll, and that changes how they read and how they spend their time. If they have never practised it, they waste minutes figuring it out.

Practising in an environment that looks like the real thing removes the surprise. AssessPrep delivers practice in a secure on-screen exam environment that mirrors the real interface, so the tools are old news by exam day.

Students should spend the exam answering questions, not learning buttons.

Once they can drive the screen, it is time to rehearse the whole thing.

3. Run full mocks in the real on-screen format

Run at least one full mock on screen. A paper mock tells you almost nothing about how a student will cope with a digital exam.

Run the whole thing digitally: same time limit, same tools, same locked-down screen. When a school runs its first on-screen A-Level mock, the pattern is nearly always the same. Content scores hold up, but time-per-question slips in the first mock and recovers by the second. That is exactly what you want to find out in a mock, not in the real exam.

If you are still weighing up how to run these at scale, our Cambridge platform buyer's guide walks through what to look for.

If the mock isn't on screen, it isn't a mock for an on-screen exam.

Full mocks show one more thing worth planning for: stamina.

4. Build typing and screen stamina for long answers

Long-answer subjects add a physical skill. English, History and Business students may write quickly by hand but type slowly, and two hours of reading on screen is tiring if they are not used to it.

Build it through normal practice. Set timed on-screen essays so students get used to typing under pressure and planning inside the answer box instead of on scrap paper. Keep an eye on the students who type slowly, because typing speed varies a lot across a class and it can quietly cost marks.

AssessPrep supports extended-response questions on screen, so stamina builds through the practice you already set. You can even ease the shift with hybrid paper-to-digital practice.

Typing endurance is a skill you train, not one students are born with.

With stamina sorted, the last exam-room skill is timing.

5. Teach on-screen timing and technique

Teach timing directly, because it works differently on screen. Students cannot fan through the whole paper at a glance, so they need a plan for pacing and for coming back to skipped questions.

Show them how to check the on-screen timer, flag a hard question and move on, and budget their reading. A quick habit helps: before a timed section, ask students to say their plan out loud. "Flag anything over two minutes, come back at the end." Said once, it sticks.

This is simple to practise inside any on-screen test you set on AssessPrep, so technique becomes routine rather than something they improvise on the day.

On screen, good timing is a taught habit, not luck.

Format and technique get them through the paper. Content is the other half.

6. Fill content gaps with topic-based practice

Practise by topic, not just by whole papers. Cambridge past papers run out fast, especially for your strongest students, and they only arrive twice a year.

A topic-tagged question bank fixes this. After a mock, instead of reissuing a full paper, set targeted practice on the two topics the class scored lowest on. It is faster for them and more useful for you. This is a bank you mark and track with, not a set of notes to read, which is the real difference from a revision site.

AssessPrep gives you 9,000+ IGCSE and 9,500+ Cambridge A-Level questions, tagged by topic, so you can pull a focused set in minutes. Browse what is covered on the Cambridge IGCSE solution page.

When past papers run out, topic-tagged practice keeps the prep going.

Once you are practising by topic, you can finally measure readiness properly.

7. Track who is actually ready

Make "ready" something you can see. Right now, readiness is often a gut feeling. Data turns it into something you can act on.

Use analytics to spot who is on track and where the class is weak. A readiness dashboard might show your class is strong on recall but weak on evaluation, which tells you exactly where the next two lessons should go. That is far more useful than a row of overall percentages.

AssessPrep breaks results down by topic and question across your classes, so you can plan intervention with assessment analytics instead of guesswork. AssessPrep supports on-screen practice like this for 800+ schools across 85+ countries.

If you can measure readiness, you can fix it before the exam.

Wrapping up

On-screen exam readiness is not a test students cram for. It is a skill you build. Get the format familiar, cover the content by topic, and track who is ready, all inside your normal teaching. Do that and the on-screen exam stops being a worry and goes back to being about what your students actually know.

The move to digital is coming whether or not any single class feels ready. Starting small this term is the easiest way to make sure yours are.

Key takeaways

• Start on-screen practice from the start of the course, not exam term.

• Teach the screen tools and timing as explicitly as the content.

• Run at least one full mock in the real on-screen format.

• Use topic-tagged practice and analytics to fix gaps and measure readiness.

Ready to see it in action?

See how Cambridge schools run on-screen IGCSE and A-Level practice and mocks in the same format students actually sit. Start a 30-day free trial or book a demo.