Cirrus Assessment customers can now build a full draft exam from their own course materials without leaving the Cirrus platform. Our authoring integration is live, and any Cirrus customer can have it switched on through their Cirrus contact.
Since 2013, Utrecht-based Cirrus has helped awarding bodies, universities, certification providers and corporate L&D teams deliver online exams. These are exams that decide whether someone gets a qualification, certification or job, so the bar for anything touching the authoring process is high.
From your own materials to a draft exam
Everything happens inside Cirrus. An author picks Add assessment, then Create with Examplary, and chooses the collection the questions should land in.
You give the test a title, set the level and supply the source material: something the organisation already holds, an uploaded document, a scanned paper copy, or text you paste in. Then you set the parameters. Taxonomy, duration, question types, plus any instructions on scope, audience and the standard of answer you expect.
Those instructions can be saved as templates. A well-tuned set of instructions becomes the house standard instead of something every author rebuilds from memory.
Official regulations can go in as well. Add an exam syllabus or a qualification standard as a guardrail, and the questions stay aligned with what the exam is meant to assess. Existing mark schemes work as input for the scoring, so the criteria follow the rules your markers already apply.
One click and a few minutes later there is a complete draft. Examplary reads the source material, builds the test structure, writes the questions and works out the scoring criteria. Open questions include rubrics and marking guidance, all pedagogically sound.
Review in the Cirrus Library
Every generated question lands in the Cirrus Library as a standard item. Same permissions, same reviewers, same approval steps, and the same audit trail of who generated, who edited and who signed off.
There is no separate bank of AI content to keep track of, and nothing to copy between systems. Examplary adds a drafting step at the front. Everything after it works the way it already did.
That matters, because a question can be factually correct and still be wrong for the exam. It can test a level of understanding that you did not intend, or use terminology that doesn't match the programme. Those calls belong to assessment professionals. The integration gets them to the review stage sooner and leaves them more time to look properly.
Why Cirrus chose Examplary
"There are plenty of AI tools that will generate questions. We chose Examplary because it is built for education and assessment, and because it works from your own syllabus and source materials." Jeroen Fransen, Head of Product at Cirrus Assessment
Fransen describes the integration as an assistant that prepares a first draft. "Everything it produces is transparent and editable in Cirrus, which keeps authors' judgement and subject expertise at the centre of the process."
What happens to your material
Education and assessment are the only thing we build for. We get one question more often than any other, usually before the demo is over: where does our material end up?
What you upload lives in your own Examplary workspace, on encrypted storage in Germany, and it stays there until you remove it. That is deliberate. Six months on you can still see which chapter, syllabus or reference document a given exam grew out of, and you can point the next one at the same set without hunting it down again.
When you generate new questions, a copy goes to our AI and it is wiped two hours after the job finishes. No model anywhere is trained on it, nothing leaves the EU at any stage, and the requests we send carry no personal data at all.
We designed around the GDPR and the AI Act from the first version of Examplary, and a person always signs off before anything is final. We made that choice early; for us, building for education means building for trust.
Trying it out
Cirrus customers can have the integration enabled by their customer success manager. Organisations that don't use Cirrus yet can ask Cirrus for a live walkthrough, including how it would fit the kind of assessments they run.
Prefer to watch first? This short walkthrough shows the integration in action, from source material to a draft in the Cirrus Library.