As you may be aware, Cirrus has been extremely busy lately with a complete overhaul of our back-end architecture. We’ve also started work on the new front-end architecture, with the first steps already visible in the new Reports section of the application.
The benefits of these changes for you as our user are twofold:
- You will have an even better exam creation and delivery experience
- The speed at which we can develop and release new features will increase significantly.
We’d like to give you a heads-up about some of the features we are releasing shortly, as well as a preview of the improvements we plan to start working on soon:
1 November 2022 release
Integrated plagiarism detection
Thanks to the new integration with Turnitin, Cirrus will now offer fully automated plagiarism detection on essay questions (file response and Office365 questions will be added at a later date. Please contact our customer success team for information on how to enable this for your organisation.
Re-marking
We are pleased to announce that we will release the new and powerful re-marking capability in Cirrus. This feature will enable your organisation to handle candidate appeals for re-evaluation:
We’ve also made several additional improvements connected to the re-marking feature, including the option for markers and moderators to view their colleagues’ scoring:
Coming soon…
Candidate item feedback facility
Additionally, the new candidate item feedback facility will soon allow test takers to submit feedback on items (e.g. mistakes in a question or a typos) during an exam. This feedback will then be emailed to the Assessment owner.
Improved candidate review sessions (Q4 2022 release)
We have completely overhauled the candidate review session feature and made it more user-friendly and flexible. A candidate review allows you to schedule a session for your test-takers to view their results. They will only be able to view the results within this time window, which is why it is often used when protecting the questions is essential.
Improved collection
The collection is where your item banks are managed. Some of our customers have thousands of questions, and organising them in a good way is paramount. We will implement the new table component and streamline how content filtering, searching and sorting is organised.
The new Statistics view will also contain several improvements, including the possibility of setting Angoff values. If you’d like to learn more about Angoff, we can recommend this article: https://maxinity.co.uk/blog/standard-setting-simplified-angoff/
In the coming months, we will also focus on several quality-of-life improvements. We’ve listened, and we hope you are excited about these changes.
Allowance for rationale to file response questions
This feature will allow test-takers to write a rationale explaining their uploaded files. It will also be possible to upload more than one file with the file response question type.
The markers will be able to download the files submitted by their candidates, annotate them and upload an annotated version. Candidates can then log in to their Cirrus candidate dashboard and view these files.
We will completely overhaul the invigilator/proctor dashboard using the new table component. This will result in a faster and more efficient monitoring of your candidates.
The following improvements are in the planning stage:
Coordinator improvements
The coordinator in Cirrus has an important role, managing the markers and setting up the marking workflow. To help them to keep track of everything, we have started working on several improvements to the coordinator role:
- The coordinator will be able to view and manage both simplified and advanced marking workflow. Previously, it was only possible to manage advanced workflows. If the assigned marker becomes unavailable, the coordinator can assign new assessors.
- The coordinator overview will be improved with a progress bar where they can track the progress of each assessment and archive assessments.
Coordinator dashboard
On the coordinator dashboard, the progress of each assessor/moderator is displayed. Moreover, the coordinator can also create tasks and assign them to individual users with a deadline.
Tasks and notifications will be conveniently displayed and alerts will be given if a new task has been assigned.
This list is incomplete, and priorities might change, but it gives a good indication of the direction of the Cirrus platform for the coming months.
As always, we appreciate your feedback, Cirrus continues to grow and improve because of you…so please keep it coming!
