Everything Zayeed does

Grading engine

The part everything else is arranged around. It is a pure library: an expression grammar, a tolerance pipeline, a scoring model and a session state machine, with no I/O and no platform assumptions.

• Nested boolean answer expressions — AND, OR, NOT and grouping over accepted answers, not a flat list of alternatives.
• Synonym groups — one concept, many surface forms, declared once and reused across items.
• Declared part counts — "any three of these five", marked as three separate credits rather than one all-or-nothing string.
• Ordering sensitivity — sequence matters when the author says it does, and is ignored when it does not.
• Partial credit and negative marking — per item, per part, with the arithmetic shown.
• A tolerance pipeline — whitespace, case, punctuation, accents, typo distance and numeric tolerance, each a stage that can be turned off.
• A single leniency control — the stages are ordered so one slider moves the whole pipeline coherently.
• Reasons, not just scores — every mark carries what matched and why, which is what an appeal actually needs.
• Question sets — a paper is assembled from named sets with their own item order and selection.
• A capability-scoped rule layer — branch, flag, message, media, navigation and declared webhooks. Nothing else is expressible.
• Deterministic randomisation — a seeded generator, so a shuffled paper can be reproduced exactly at appeal.
• A session state machine — a pure reducer over an event log: started, answered, cleared, bookmarked, navigated, paused, resumed, branched, submitted. Replay the log, get the state.
• Access arrangements — see the accessibility page; they are engine-level, not a settings screen.

Document model

• Blocks, runs and marks — one model shared by the question, the accepted answers and the candidate's response.
• Maths — written, stored and compared as structure rather than as an image of structure.
• RTF import — paste from the word processor the question bank has been living in.
• Marked-text editing — the author marks which formatting is significant, inline, in the text itself.
• Formatting-sensitive comparison — H₂SO₄ and H2SO4 differ only if the author declared that they do.

Pack format

• .mcq container — a portable, offline, self-contained exam pack: items, media, rules, sets and the on-screen keyboard layout, in an encrypted binary container whose directory is encrypted too.
• Specified, not just shipped — a written specification and published test vectors, so a reader can be implemented from the specification alone, in any language.
• Per-pack keys in slots — a passphrase, a colleague's public key, this device, an entitlement, or an exam-window key. No global key, and none compiled into any binary.
• Plaintext export is guaranteed — a build gate asserts that anyone who can open a file can always export it in the clear. Encryption protects a paper from a candidate, not an author from us.
• Opens what came before — the .mcqx ZIP and legacy MCQPro Access banks, decided by reading the bytes rather than by the extension.
• A lossless bridge — pack to database and back with nothing dropped in either direction.
• Media travels inside — a pack handed over on a memory stick opens on a machine with no network and nothing missing.

On-screen keyboard

• Unicode-first — a key emits a string, not a key code, so one key types a combining mark or a whole cluster.
• Named levels — shift, alt-graph and author-defined levels have names rather than numbers.
• Direction-aware — right-to-left layouts are a property of the layout, not a fork of the component.
• Four built-in layouts — Latin, maths and chemistry, IPA, Bangla. Nothing has to be configured to use it.
• Travels in the pack — a custom layout ships with the exam that needs it.

Analytics

• Facility and discrimination per item.
• KR-20 reliability for the paper.
• Distractor analysis — which wrong option is doing the work, and which is dead weight.
• Attempt series — the same candidate over time, and the same item over cohorts.
• Recomputed, never cached — the numbers come from the stored attempts each time they are shown. An item's saved statistics change only when a person asks for it.
• Time on each question — replayed from the session log rather than a stopwatch in the player, so it survives a reload, a crash and a sitting paused for a fire alarm. Paused time is not counted and a question never displayed carries no time rather than a zero.
• Equating between two forms — mean/mean, mean/sigma, Haebara and Stocking–Lord, with the anchor found by intersecting the two papers rather than nominated, drifted anchors named and set aside, and the constants shown as what they do to a real measure. Nothing is rescaled automatically: operating from a link is a judgement somebody signs for.

Database and sync

• One schema definition generating both SQLite and Postgres, with a parity test that fails if they drift.
• Full local replica on every shell — the app is never waiting on a server to show you your own library.
• HLC-ordered operation log — hybrid logical clocks order writes across devices that disagree about the time.
• Settings are rows — org, user, device and pack scopes resolved in that order, so a preference set on the laptop is already set on the phone.
• Pairing by six-digit code, and join-by-code for a candidate with no account at all.
• Three ways to travel, one merge rule — an account over the network, two devices on the same local network with no server at all, or a .mcq bundle carried on a memory stick. All three end in the same rows, because only one of them decides anything.
• A bundle merges, it does not overwrite — it carries the changes the other device has not seen, so applying it twice does nothing the second time.
• Convergence tested — three replicas take thousands of randomly interleaved and partitioned writes, then sync to quiescence and must end byte-identical.

Interoperability

• QTI 3.0 import and export, with per-item notes where a construct does not map, instead of silent loss.
• LTI 1.3 — Deep Linking, launch and Assignment and Grade Services. See Integrations.
• Self-hosting — point the server at your own Postgres and it is your data, on your estate.

Import

• Nine kinds of question bank — spreadsheets and CSV, Moodle XML, GIFT, Aiken, QTI, .mcq and .mcqx files, legacy MCQPro Access banks, and questions pasted into a box.
• Read by their bytes, not by their extension, so a renamed file still opens as what it is.
• Reviewed before anything is written — see what it would add, update and leave alone, then decide. The commit step takes the reviewed preview, so a screen cannot skip the review.
• Nothing is dropped quietly — every record a reader could not use is reported with the place it came from, down to bank.csv row 4.
• Re-import updates rather than duplicates — identity is derived from the source, so a corrected export mends the questions you already have instead of making a second bank.
• Legacy banks need no Windows — Access 97 and Access 2000 files are read directly, with no Jet driver and no ODBC, including the old expression tree and text-replacement table.

Certificates

• Signed over their own fields with the awarding body's Ed25519 key — so an employer with no network, no account and no permission from us can check one from the file and a public key alone.
• A PDF written byte by byte, not by a browser: the font travels inside the document, so a name in Bangla or Arabic prints as its owner spells it, and the same certificate renders to identical bytes twice.
• A reason, not a verdict — withdrawn, expired, altered and "I have never seen this issuer's key" are four different things to tell a person, and only one of them is an accusation.
• Withdrawal is signed too — anyone can write a list claiming your certificates are void; an unsigned or foreign-signed one is ignored.
• Who qualifies is one rule, applied by the same function that explains each refusal beside the candidate it concerns, and by the batch signer.

Getting work onto another machine

• Three routes, one merge rule — an account over the network, two devices on the same local network with no server at all, or a file carried by hand.
• Confirmed once — a first pairing shows six digits on both screens. If they differ, something is relaying the connection, and the screen says to stop.
• Sealed and replay-proof — a repeated or reordered frame is refused, because a repeated "push these changes" is how two copies of a library are made to disagree.
• A bundle merges, it does not overwrite — it carries changes rather than a snapshot, so applying it twice does nothing the second time.
• An exam paper can be sealed to its sitting — distributed a week early, unreadable until the invigilator releases the key, with every early release recorded against a name and a reason.

What is not built yet

Everything above this heading is implemented and ships in the builds you can download today. Everything below it is not, and is listed here for the same reason the rest of the page exists: a feature list that mentions only what works is read as a claim that everything else works too.