We’ve spent the last six months listening to you and making Cirrus work better in the ways that matter most. Some updates are small but meaningful, others are major additions that change how you work. Either way, the goal has been the same: remove the friction and help you deliver high-quality assessments with confidence.
The last six months: Listening, building, delivering
Here are the highlights from what we’ve shipped between April and October:
Stability improvements and customer-driven fixes
Before we talk about the big features, it’s worth highlighting the work that doesn’t always make headlines but absolutely should. Over the past six months, we’ve focused heavily on platform stability, addressing the small frustrations and edge cases you’ve reported. From fixing copy-paste issues in open-ended questions to resolving preview glitches and improving webhook reliability, we’ve been working through your feedback systematically. If you want the full rundown, you’ll find everything documented in our release notes.
Cirrus Assist: AI-powered item authoring
We introduced Cirrus Assist, our AI-powered authoring tool designed to speed up question creation without compromising quality or control. Built directly into the Library, Cirrus Assist helps you generate items from scratch, extract questions from PDFs or Word documents, refine existing content and get AI-generated feedback to improve quality. You bring your own AI subscription, keeping your data secure in your environment.
New marking dashboard and enhanced rescoring
We overhauled the Marking Dashboard and Rescoring tools, giving you instant visibility into candidate performance and a streamlined way to act on what you find.
Proctorio Live proctoring
Proctorio Live brings enhanced real-time proctoring capabilities to the Cirrus Proctorio integration. You can now bring your own invigilators and assign one or multiple invigilators to each exam schedule, with expanded control during live exams.
Invigilators can chat with candidates, pause or resume exam sessions, view live webcam and screen footage and monitor activity logs in real time, tracking events like tab unfocus or visits to specific websites.
This means you can intervene immediately for content protection, provide candidate support when needed and still have full recordings, flags and reporting available on demand.
Turnitin integration, now with file response support
We’ve extended our Turnitin integration to support file response questions. Whether candidates submit essays as text or upload Word documents, PDFs or other files, plagiarism detection now works consistently across all formats.
Compare assessment versions at a glance
Understanding how changes to your assessments impact outcomes is critical. You can now display pass rate and candidate count per assessment version, allowing you to compare different versions side by side and see exactly how modifications affected performance.
For an overview of all features released in 2025, not just the ones highlighted here, check out our release notes.
Q4: What’s coming next
Auto-delete for exam schedules
You’ll be able to automatically delete exam schedules via the API once they’re complete. Useful if you’re running high-volume testing and don’t want old schedules cluttering up your system.
What we’re working on for early 2026
We’ve spent the past few months rebuilding parts of Cirrus that nobody sees but that need to be stronger to support what’s coming. It’s unglamorous work: updating old code, restructuring databases, making sure everything can handle what we’re about to throw at it. But it matters, because it’s what lets us build what comes next.
And what comes next is big. We’re talking about a complete reimagining of how candidates experience exams, AI that helps you mark open questions at scale without sacrificing quality, and analytics that turn your assessment data into strategic decisions. These aren’t incremental updates, they’re the features we’ve been building toward for months.
We’ll be back in touch with full details as we get closer to launch, but here’s a sneak preview of what’s coming:
Neo Candidate Delivery
We’re rebuilding the exam-taking experience from the ground up. Classic Candidate Delivery has served us well, but Neo is designed for how people actually use technology now: on any device, anywhere. Full mobile support, dark mode, enhanced accessibility, streamlined navigation and faster performance. We’re starting with the five most commonly used question types and rolling out in phases from early 2026.
In the coming weeks, we’ll share more information about the Neo roll-out, including timelines and how to prepare for the transition.
AI-assisted marking
Mark open questions and essays faster while staying in control. The AI suggests scores and feedback based on your rubric, you review and adjust. This opens up new possibilities: mock exams with open questions at scale, AI-generated feedback for formative assessments, and more time for the cases that need your expertise.
Cirrus Data & Insights
Cirrus Data & Insights will give you enhanced reporting inside Cirrus with more customisation for different roles, and make it easier to export your data and analyse it in the tools you already use. It will allow you to spot trends earlier, identify issues faster and make decisions that improve outcomes across your assessment programme.
We’ll bring you along for the journey
These are significant additions to how Cirrus works, and we’re not rushing them out the door. Before any of these features go live, you’ll get proper documentation, training resources and plenty of advance notice. We’ll work with early testers to refine the experience and when it’s time to launch, you’ll have everything you need to make the transition smooth.
Want to test these features early or help shape what we’re building? Let your customer success manager know. We’ll be sharing more details soon. Stay tuned!
