Independent School Examination
Reimagining examination
Year
2022-2023
Company
Century TECH
Client
ISEB
Role
Lead Designer
Users
14K+
Intro
Starting Point
Research
Solution
Problem
After 8 years of being industry leaders ISEB were seeing subscription drops with a new wave of ed-tech companies entering the race. Appart from outdated designs, the product was proving to not offer services that would compete agains the perhaps cheeper alternatives. ISEB was still leadig in examination content quality but is lagging behind in user satisfaction in the product and processes. It is URGENT to reevaluate the user needs and solve the biggest shortcomigs to maintain industry leader possition.
Solution
Research uncovered a number of issues requiring out of app communications and data handling. Best solution is to expand product sweet and introduce access to the product for multiple different users. This allows safer data sharing and prevent data leaking, faster and more standardised processes and communications and a significant human labor costs reduction.
Research findings
Application Overlap: Students often apply to multiple senior schools, but the system lacks a way to track this information.
Manual Processes: Senior schools manually onboard applicants, and testing is often administered at middle schools (invigilation centres), not the senior schools themselves.
Communication Issues: Invigilation centres lack access to testing tools, and all exam-related information is exchanged between schools and centres via email and phone, leading to frequent errors and delays.
Staffing: On average, invigilation centres hire 1.5 staff members annually to facilitate examinations, without any compensation for their work.
Post-Exam Complexity: After exams, invigilation centres submit test declarations manually for each student, forwarding them to relevant senior schools by email—an error-prone process that causes delays.
Multiple Test Attempts: Although students aren’t supposed to take the same test more than once, communication gaps in the system often allow this, with some parents paying for multiple attempts to improve results.
Test Result Access: When applying to multiple schools, only one senior school initially has access to the student’s results, requiring the applicant to request and share them manually with other schools.
Admin and Guardian Access: ISEB administrators have no interface to monitor users and assist, and guardians also lack direct access to exam information, depending solely on communications from schools or invigilation centres.
High-Stress Environment: These high-stakes exams create significant pressure on applicants, leading to high stress, which often results in issues like fainting, panic attacks, incomplete tests, and requests for retakes.
New Infrustructure
After extensive workshops and consultations, and examining all the data, it became clear that the product was lacking in data sharing and access section thus an introduction of new user type apps was necessary to resolve a lot of issues. I have identified 5 users types we will have to cover for new ecosystem. We already improves applicant/student flows so for phase II we are focusing on the following:
Learning planner
Reimagining examination
14K+
Users
30+
Awards
32+
Investments
Problem
Solution
Research
Development
Problem
Education system in the UK allows for teachers across the board to follow multitude of various schemes of work. Century Tech is a B2C product that comes with a variaty of high level learning content following a specific scheme of work for each subject. This is overwritten by an AI engin that creates a personalised learning path for each students soo learning. However, teachers have no way of manipulating the cntent to match their teaching schedule. Homework tool available is too limited for the scale of the whole years plan.
Solution
Introduction of a scheme of work management tool that allows teachers to plan their teaching program for the whole accademic year. This needs to be editable, simple to use, sharable and provide acurate data, easily digestable data. Planned learning needs to be priorotised over individual learning systems.