The questions buyers actually ask.
Answered the way they would be answered in the meeting, including the places where the honest answer is “no” or “that is your policy, not ours”.
The basics
5 questions
What is Xamina, in one sentence?
A platform for running exams online. You write the questions, we deliver the exam — supervised, with an ID check first — mark it instantly, and issue a certificate an employer can check.
Who is it for?
Institutions whose sittings carry consequences: universities running summative assessment, ministries and regulators running national examinations, and certification bodies selling seats. If a disputed result would end in an appeal, it is built for you.
Is it a testing tool or an examination system?
An examination system. The difference shows up after the sitting rather than during it: what was served, what was answered, what was flagged, who decided, and whether all of that can still be produced a year later.
Can several institutions share one deployment?
Yes, and that is the normal case. Tenancy is enforced at the data layer by a database client extension, not by application code remembering a filter.
What languages does it support?
The interface ships with English and Arabic, including a right-to-left layout rather than a mirrored one. Questions, exams and certificates are authored in whatever language you write them in.
Proctoring & privacy
6 questions
Do you record candidates for the whole sitting?
No. Frames are analysed in flight; clean frames are discarded and never stored.
What triggers a flag?
Thirty-three event types, from the environmental (face absent, more than one face, gaze off screen, a prohibited object, a second display) to the behavioural: tab switch, fullscreen exit, paste, devtools, clock tampering, an answer-pattern anomaly. Each carries a threshold, and every threshold is set per exam.
Does a flag fail a candidate?
A flag never decides a grade. What it can do is bounded and configurable: log only, warn the candidate, notify a proctor, pause, auto-submit, or invalidate the attempt.
How strict is proctoring, and who decides?
An administrator, per exam. A formative quiz and a professional certification can run on the same deployment with entirely different thresholds, different identity requirements and different review rules.
What about candidates who cannot meet the requirements?
Identity check-in and camera-based proctoring can both be turned off for an exam, and a referral always routes to a person rather than a refusal. Accessibility and integrity are not traded against each other by the software; that is a policy the institution sets.
How long is proctoring data kept?
A retention policy runs weekly and enforces the window you configure. Because clean frames were never stored, what expires is the small evidential set attached to flags, not an archive of everybody.
Identity check-in
4 questions
How do you know who actually sat the paper?
Before the paper opens, the candidate presents an identity document. It is read, the face is matched against it, and the name is matched against the enrolment.
What happens if the check fails?
The attempt does not start, and the case is referred to a human reviewer who can pass the candidate through manually. A check that cannot be completed is a blocked attempt rather than a waved-through one.
Which documents are supported?
Passports, national identity cards and driving licences with a machine-readable zone. Where a document has both an MRZ and printed text, the checksum-validated MRZ is authoritative.
Is the document image kept?
The check result and its audit record are kept. Image retention follows the same configured retention window as other proctoring evidence, and the document itself is never exposed through the candidate-facing API.
Running it
5 questions
Can we self-host?
Yes, with the full feature set. The same image runs on your infrastructure or on ours; nothing is held back for a managed tier.
What does it need to run?
PostgreSQL, Redis and object storage. The API is a single NestJS deployable, the web app is Next.js, and the vision service is a separate Python container you can leave out entirely if you do not use camera proctoring.
How does it scale for a large sitting?
Delivery is stateless behind a load balancer, and the expensive work (grading, analytics, certificates, grade sync) runs on thirteen background queues with their own retry policies rather than inside the request that triggered it. A slow certificate render cannot delay a candidate submitting.
What happens if a candidate loses connection mid-exam?
Answers are saved as they are given, not at the end. The attempt survives a reconnect, the clock is authoritative on the server rather than in the browser, and every event is in the attempt’s append-only stream so what happened is reconstructable afterwards.
Do you have an audit log?
Yes, and it is written on the write path by the same database extension that enforces tenancy, in the same transaction as the change itself. There is no "and remember to log it" step, so there is no code path that quietly skips it.
Integration
4 questions
Does it work with our LMS?
Yes. Set it up once and the exam shows up as an activity inside Canvas, Moodle or Blackboard, and results pass back on their own.
Is there an API?
Yes, and everything the website does can be done through it, so your own systems can drive Xamina directly. Your developers will find the reference linked in the header.
Can we get events into our own systems?
Yes. Your own systems can be told automatically when something happens — somebody passes, a certificate is issued.
How do we get our existing questions in?
You upload them and we track the import as a job. If some rows fail you get a report naming exactly which ones and why, instead of a browser upload that dies at row nine thousand and leaves you guessing.
Commercial
4 questions
Can we sell exam seats through resellers?
Yes. Partners call a signed API to read their catalogue and turn a completed payment into one single-use voucher.
Can a partner refund a sale?
They call one endpoint and the platform decides. Never redeemed, the code is revoked.
How is it priced?
By agreement, and it depends on the two things that actually vary: sitting volume, and whether you host it or we do. Ask with a rough annual candidate count and you get a number rather than a discovery call.
How do we try it?
Sign in with an institutional address and run the whole loop on your own content: author a bank, publish an exam, enrol a cohort, sit it, and look at what the audit log has to say about all of it.
Something not answered here?
The API reference is the most complete answer to most technical questions, and the platform tour covers the rest module by module.
Ready to run your first sitting?
Sign in with an institutional address to author a bank, publish an exam and enrol a cohort.