The best online exam software for 2027

It covers the part before the exam that most tools skip. AI drafts a paper in your format, and the paper then goes through draft, review and approval with a record of who changed what.

On the day, you pick the room. Online, proctoring records the candidate's screen but keeps only the moments they leave the exam, so nobody has to sit through hours of video. On paper, every page carries a signed QR code. Scan the whole pile in whatever order it comes back and each page still finds its student.

Afterwards, AI reads the scripts and suggests a mark for each part, with its reasoning. An examiner checks and releases it. The AI never has the last word. Results, percentiles across shifts, result sheets and transcripts all come from those released marks.

Pricing depends on how big your exams are, and you have to ask us for it.

ExamSoft, now part of Turnitin, runs exams offline on a locked-down device, which is what you want when the Wi-Fi in a hall can't be trusted. Questions are tagged to categories, so students get feedback on strengths and weaknesses rather than a single number. It sells to businesses and government too.

We couldn't find anything on its site about scanning paper scripts or AI help with marking.

Proctorio watches the session. It records video, the desk and web traffic, blocks screenshots, checks ID and signature, and looks at whether the writing is original. It works across K-12, universities, workforce training and credentialing.

That's the whole job, though. Writing the paper, running it and marking it stay wherever they are today.

Talview pairs AI proctoring with AI interviews: identity checks, deepfake detection, live monitoring and an audit trail for every session. Like Proctorio, it secures the session rather than running the exam around it.

Gradescope starts after the exam. Students upload PDFs or photos of their work, Gradescope groups answers that look alike so one decision marks many, autograders handle code, and students can ask for a regrade online. It has been doing this for years.

Turnitin checks work against what it calls the world's largest academic database, adds AI-writing detection, and gives feedback through Feedback Studio. For exams it points you to its sister products, ExamSoft and Gradescope. That works, but it means buying and joining up several things.

Mettl calls itself a talent assessment company, and its range shows it: psychometric tests, 360-degree feedback, AI coding assessments, English tests and virtual assessment centres. It says more than 6,000 organisations use it. It's built for hiring, not for end-of-term papers.

Questionmark says more than 750 organisations trust it. It's FedRAMP authorised and ISO 27001 certified, offers proctoring options and plugs into systems like Workday and Cornerstone. A good fit for a compliance team; less so for a school.

HackerRank runs coding tests and checks for suspicious coding activity, identity and extra faces on camera, and now has an AI interviewer with AI-assisted evaluation. It's made for interviews. If you need a programming exam for a class with a mark sheet at the end, SparkExam runs coding papers in several languages next to written and paper ones.