How to start on-screen exams in your IB school

Run one on-screen exam. Just one. Pick a small group, set a timer, lock the screens, and watch what happens. You do not need a device audit or a policy paper first. You need to see your own students sit your own exam on your own Wi-Fi. Ten minutes is enough for the first try. Everything you do next should come from what that session shows you.

That is the short answer. The rest of this is what one school learned after a year of doing it.

Getting ready for digital exams: the short answers

What one IB school learned preparing for digital exams

Ecolint, the International School of Geneva, is selected for the IB's digital examinations programme. Its Group 1 and Group 2 students sit digital exams in May 2027, and the whole of 2026 went into getting ready.

Jonathan Freinberg teaches English Literature and Language A there, across MYP and DP. His first experience of school tech was a one-to-one iPad programme in Scotland, and it left him with a line he still repeats:

"Access to technology does not automatically produce better academic use of technology."

Ecolint made the same guess most schools make. Their students already used ManageBac, Google tools and AssessPrep every day, so moving exams on screen looked like a small step. At the simple level, it was.

"Students of that age right now, they can learn a new tool so quickly. It's incredible how they can adapt to the software that's put in front of them."

Students moved around the screen, used the highlighter, handed work in without help. Then the real problem showed up.

"A student can be extremely confident socially and technologically, and will still find 70 or 90 minutes of sustained academic screen work difficult."

A student learns the highlighter in thirty seconds. That does not mean they know what to highlight. The tools take minutes. The thinking takes a year.

Six steps to get your school ready for digital exams

1. Run a real digital exam before you plan anything

"You can predict problems in a planning meeting, but you discover the real problems that your school context might have, and your students actually will have, when they sit down and do the task."

Your problems will be your students, on your devices, in your hall, in your subjects. You will not find them on paper. The first run does not need to be a full Paper 1. A ten-minute timed task in lockdown teaches you more than a term of meetings.

2. Use the exam tools in normal lessons, but not every lesson

The screen should not be something students only meet at mock time. Not every day and not for every task, just often enough that it feels normal.

The IB has shared its exam software through My IB, with a sample paper for each exam.  It shows students the split screen, which is the part that feels strange at first.Refer to both: the IB for the real thing, a platform like AssessPrep for the repeat practice the sandbox cannot give.

3. Start digital practice before DP

This is the step schools skip. Ecolint’s Year 11 students took every summative assessment on screen, timed, in lockdown. So when those students walked into a DP mock, nothing was new.

"It builds that resilience to issues, but also it means when they click on the screen, they don't have that 5-minute, okay, where is everything? How do I get started? What is this software?"

If your first digital cohort sits in 2030, you have time to do this properly. Start now with low-stakes tasks in class.

4. Find out which students type slowly

You need to know which students type slowly, and that fact will not turn up on its own. How fast a student writes tells you nothing about how fast they type. A quick, thoughtful writer can be a slow typist, and you only find out in a timed task. ICT lessons can carry this, so can homework, and free typing sites will track words per minute.

5. Check every student individually after a digital mock

"The strongest paper might not be written by the strongest student."

Going digital shuffles the pack. A student held back for years by messy handwriting may suddenly do better. Another loses the planning system they built over five years. A third student types so fast they write far too much and lose control of the plan. None of that shows up in a class average.

6. Sit the digital exam yourself, as a department

Open the paper on screen. Put the split view up. Start the clock. Use the same tools you ask students to use.

"Doing it even once is really revealing. You'll notice the things that are invisible when you're standing in front of the classroom telling students to do it."

Halfway through his own attempt, Jonathan wanted to draw an arrow between two ideas, and to put two passages side by side and circle something. Neither tool exists on screen. You can highlight and you can make notes. That is it, and you will not find that in a manual.

Afterwards, pick two or three things that felt awkward and make a plan for each. That is your preparation plan. Teachers' most common question is not how the software works, it is where the hours come from, and Ecolint's answer was to use department meetings they already had rather than adding new training.

Three things that catch schools out in digital exams

Typing is not a small detail. Slow and fast typists have opposite problems. A slow typist knows exactly what they want to say and cannot get it down in time. A fast typist gets everything on screen at once, then spends a big chunk of the exam cutting and rearranging. Writing by hand slows you down in a useful way, and typing takes that away. Jonathan's wider point is about the spread. The distance between your fastest and slowest typist is bigger than between your fastest and slowest writer.

Students lose the planning system they spent years building. By the end of MYP most students have their own: colour codes, boxes, arrows, margin notes, a picture of the page in their head. On screen they get a text box, a menu and a split view. The fix is not to digitise everything.

"Preparing students for digital assessment doesn't mean digitizing all of their learning."

Keep the paper habits that help them think, then teach them how to move those habits onto the screen. That move does not happen by itself.

The timer matters more than you think. Some students find a countdown calming, some find it stressful. There is no right answer, which is exactly why it needs practice. Let students try it showing, hidden, counting up and counting down.

Practise technical failure before the digital exam

Ofqual's research found that students fear technical failure like a frozen screen, a power cut, or a server going down. The failure is only half of it. Even when the problem was fixed quickly, students stayed shaken and lost their thread.

"Just like we do fire drills in school for something that we hope doesn't happen, we should do drills on things going wrong in an assessment, and how do we recover from that."

Freeze a session on purpose. Let a machine drop out. Practise getting back in.

Where an on-screen exam practice platform fits

None of this needs a particular product. It needs repeat practice in real conditions, which is the part schools find hardest to set up.

That is the gap AssessPrep was built for, ten years ago, when MYP moved to eAssessment and schools hit this exact wall. The parts that make practice cheap to repeat:

• A lockdown app for MacBook, Windows, iPad and Chromebook, so practice feels like the real exam

• Timed assessments with the same tools students get on the day: notepad, highlighter, split view, bookmarks, and a timer they can hide

• An import tool that turns your existing PDF papers into on-screen assessments

• A live monitoring screen where you can add extra time mid-exam, turn on text-to-speech or a dyslexia-friendly font for one student, and message a student who is stuck

• Answers saved on the laptop as well as online, which matters because a frozen screen is what students fear most

• Guest access, so teachers can sit the exam without a student account

For subjects not going digital yet, Paper Mode lets teachers build the assessment on screen, print it, and scan handwritten scripts back in for AI-assisted marking and analytics. A maths department not going digital until 2030 can still get the data.

Is your school ready to start digital exams this term?

Start now if:

• Your first digital cohort sits in 2027 or 2028. You are already behind.

• You run MYP and DP in the same school. The MYP years are where the cheap practice lives.

• You have one class set of devices and a room. That is enough.

• Your department can give up one meeting to sit an exam.

Start smaller if:

• Your Wi-Fi and devices cannot handle a full cohort. Run the one-class version anyway, just do not promise your head of school a whole-school rollout yet.

• Your first digital cohort sits in 2030 and your MYP practice is already on screen. Put the time into teacher practice instead.

• You are hoping this will settle a buying decision this term. It will not. It will tell you what your students need, which is more useful.

One planning point either way: once a school goes digital, the whole subject group goes digital. Unless a student has a specific accommodation, there is no half-and-half.

Getting ready for digital exams: what actually matters

This is not an IT project with some teaching in it. It is a teaching project with some IT in it. Schools that get that the wrong way round spend a year fixing problems their students never had.

Students will learn the software. What takes a year is everything else: reading closely on a screen, planning without arrows and margins, thinking for ninety minutes with a clock running, keeping going when something breaks.

Start with one exam. Watch what happens. Build the rest out of what you saw, not what you expected.

Key takeaways

• Run a simulated digital exam before you write a plan. Ten minutes in real conditions teaches you more than a term of meetings.

• Students learn the screen in minutes. Doing good school work on it takes about a year, so start before DP.

• Typing speed, lost planning habits and the timer hit students differently. Check individuals, not class averages.

• Teachers should sit the digital exam themselves. One department meeting will surface problems on manual lists.

Contributor and much gratitude to Jonathan Freinberg. He teaches English Literature and Language A at the International School of Geneva (Ecolint), across MYP and DP. Ecolint was selected for the IB's digital examinations programme, and its Group 1 and Group 2 students sit digital exams in May 2027. Everything in this guide comes from what his school learned getting ready.