# Zayeed

> Author, deliver and mark assessments on web, Windows, Linux and Android — one account, one database, offline.

Zayeed is an assessment platform: author questions, deliver them, mark them and
report on them, on the web, on Windows and Linux, and on Android. Two rules
shape the whole product.

1. **One engine, many shells.** Grading, sessions, documents, formats and
   analytics live in shared packages. A shell is a user interface over them and
   never re-implements a rule, so the same answer gets the same mark on a phone
   and on a laptop — structurally, not as a policy.
2. **One logical database.** Every device holds a full SQLite replica of one
   schema and converges through an HLC-ordered operation log. Items, attempts,
   results and settings are rows in that one database. Offline is the normal
   case; the network only ever adds other people's work to what you already have.

## What is distinctive

- **Formatting is markable.** Question, accepted answers and candidate response
  are all marked text in one document model, so an author can require the
  subscripts in H2SO4 for a chemistry item and ignore them for a prose item.
  Declared per item; never moved by the leniency control.
- **One leniency control.** A staged tolerance pipeline — whitespace, case,
  punctuation, accents, spelling variants, edit distance — behind a single
  setting, with the reason shown next to every mark.
- **Answers are expressions, not lists.** ANY, ALL, COUNT(n of m), synonym
  groups, declared part counts, ordering sensitivity, partial credit.
- **The keyboard travels with the exam.** Keys emit strings rather than key
  codes, so a script the device cannot type is still answerable. Latin, maths
  and chemistry, IPA and Bangla are built in.
- **Access arrangements are engine-level.** Extra time is a share of the paper
  applied by returning a longer session configuration; rest breaks stop the
  clock and are derived from the pause events already in the log. Granted on the
  account, honoured by every shell.
- **It manages the test, not only the question.** A six-state item workflow with
  named roles (an author cannot approve their own question); papers built to a
  blueprint — so many from this topic at this difficulty, with the bank's
  headroom shown as you write it; a register of candidates, cohorts and access
  arrangements where the most lenient variation wins and the screen says which;
  rubric marking with blind double marking, a tolerance for disagreement and a
  moderator whose mark is appended rather than overwriting; and Angoff standard
  setting that produces the evidence, not just the number. All of it on all four
  shells, offline.
- **Two delivery contracts over one engine.** `open` is optimised for friction
  approaching zero — no account, nothing installed, a question typed mid-room.
  `assessed` is optimised for defensibility — the content arrives first, the
  clock cannot be bought back, and the attempt survives an appeal. The mode is
  chosen per sitting, not per build: there is no exam build and no polling
  build, and the same `.mcq` can be delivered either way. Exactly three things
  differ — what is required before a sitting starts, what is recorded while it
  runs, what is kept when it ends.
- **A pack can be played in front of a room.** People join on their phones
  with a six-character code — no account, no install — and the host paces the
  questions from the screen at the front. A quiz is marked by the same engine a
  sitting uses, so the score agrees with the paper. The tally type has nowhere
  to put a participant id, so a projector cannot be made to show who voted for
  what. Questions can be improvised mid-room; ratings, net promoter and
  rankings are not new item types (a rating is a numeric item carrying its
  scale, a ranking is the ordering type), which is why all four shells got them
  at once and why a room can be saved back to a `.mcq` pack.
- **The relay can be your own laptop.** The live server runs on the machine at
  the front of the room with one command — the same program the hosted site
  runs, with phones joining over the local network and nothing crossing the
  router. It announces itself only because a person started it, and keeps
  nothing by default. A hall with no internet still runs rooms, and a poll about
  pay leaves no data with a third party because there is no data anywhere else.
  Proven at 1,000 simulated phones against one relay: every acknowledged answer
  counted, slowest answer 40ms, no snapshot ever carrying another participant's
  id.
- **A silent recording is the failure mode this is engineered against.** A
  picture that fails to draw fails visibly; a recording that fails to play fails
  silently, and a candidate cannot tell a broken clip from a clip of silence. So
  an assessed sitting that needs a format the machine cannot decode is refused
  at the door with the reason, an open room is warned and runs, and a browser's
  `maybe` is never flattened into a `yes`. Sound is Opus and film is VP9, both
  in WebM — royalty-free, and therefore actually present on the Linux desktops
  that will not decode H.264 or AAC. SVG is sanitised on the way in and refused
  if it cannot be made safe.
- **An attempt can prove what it was.** Every event is hashed into a chain over
  canonical bytes with a published version string, sealed at submission with
  Ed25519 and verifiable offline from a public key alone. An unsealed attempt is
  reported as unsealed, never as tampered — those are different findings and
  only one of them is about a person — and the integrity report never accuses
  anybody.
- **Lockdown ships its own limits.** Three levels, each printing on screen what
  it cannot do, with the per-platform truth stated rather than averaged: a Linux
  desktop on Wayland is not permitted to suppress screenshots, so Supervised
  there is Focused plus display detection and the app says so. None of it can
  see a phone under the desk, and a camera pointed at the screen defeats every
  screenshot restriction on every platform.
- **Sections with their own clocks and their own doors.** Per-section time limits, sealed sections that close behind the candidate, and per-section back navigation — opt-in, so a paper without them is unchanged.
- **46,573 generated conformance cases** pin behaviour that must not drift:
  30,240 over the grading grammar, because "we improved the marker" and "we
  changed people's grades" are the same sentence; 15,000 over media acceptance
  and SVG sanitising; 1,333 over the attempt chain's canonical bytes. Two of
  those suites carry promises that are asserted live and are not allowed to be
  re-baselined — the sanitiser may never emit executable content, and the
  attempt chain may not change its bytes while claiming the same version.
- **The file format is specified, not just shipped.** `.mcq` is an encrypted,
  signed binary container with an encrypted directory and a per-pack key wrapped
  into key slots — passphrase, public key, device, entitlement, exam window.
  There is no global key and none compiled into any binary, and a build gate
  asserts that any key holder can always export in the clear.
- **Work travels three ways and they agree.** An account over the network, two
  devices on one local network with no server at all, or a `.mcq` bundle carried
  by hand. All three funnel into one merge rule, so they end in the same rows.
- **Certificates, licences and sealed papers are checked offline.** A certificate
  verifies ten years from now from the issuer's public key alone. An exam paper
  can be sealed to a key the invigilator releases only inside the window. A
  licence can decide whether a screen opens; a build gate stops it ever reaching
  the marker.

## Platforms

- Web — React + Vite, full SQLite replica in the browser's private file system, installable, offline.
- Windows / Linux / macOS — Tauri 2. Adds .mcq files on disk, several windows on
  one replica, lockdown mode, and device-to-device sync on the local network.
- Android — Expo. Full authoring as well as sitting, .mcq save/open through the
  share sheet, and device-to-device sync on the local network. A teacher whose
  only computer is a phone is not an edge case.
- Server — Fastify on Node, SQLite or Postgres. Only needed for sync, LTI and join-by-code.

## Interop

LTI 1.3 (Deep Linking, launch, Assignment and Grade Services), QTI 3.0 import
and export, and the encrypted .mcq pack format for estates with no network at
all. Import reads spreadsheets, CSV, Moodle XML, GIFT, Aiken, QTI, .mcq/.mcqx
files, legacy MCQPro Access banks and pasted text, always previewing what it
would do to the library before anything is written.
Self-hosting is first class, including air-gapped.

## Pages

- [Zayeed](https://zayeed.org/): Author, deliver and mark assessments on web, Windows, Linux and Android against one account and one database — offline, with the same mark on every device.
- [Features](https://zayeed.org/features.html): Every Zayeed capability, grouped by the package it lives in: grading, documents, the .mcq pack format, keyboards, analytics, sync and interoperability.
- [Test and quiz management](https://zayeed.org/management.html): Review workflow, blueprint-built papers, registers and access arrangements, double marking with moderation, timed sections, and Angoff standard setting.
- [Platforms and offline sync](https://zayeed.org/platforms.html): Web, Windows, Linux and Android over one account and one database. A full local replica on every device, pairing by code, and offline as the normal case.
- [Authoring and automatic grading](https://zayeed.org/authoring.html): Marked text end to end, a nested boolean grading grammar, one leniency control over the whole tolerance pipeline, and a keyboard that travels in the pack.
- [Live rooms and exam delivery](https://zayeed.org/delivery.html): Audience polling with no accounts and formal exam delivery from one engine and one .mcq file: media checked at the door, tamper-evident attempts, lockdown that states its limits.
- [Accessibility and access arrangements](https://zayeed.org/accessibility.html): Extra time as a share of the paper, stopped-clock rest breaks, text scale, high contrast and a screen-reader layout — applied by the engine on every shell.
- [LTI 1.3, QTI 3.0 and self-hosting](https://zayeed.org/integrations.html): An LTI 1.3 tool with Deep Linking and grade return into Moodle, Canvas or Blackboard. QTI 3.0 import and export, encrypted .mcq packs; self-hosting too.
- [Security](https://zayeed.org/security.html): A capability-scoped action set with no process spawn, no shared encryption password and no stored card numbers — plus how to report a vulnerability.
- [Documentation](https://zayeed.org/docs.html): Getting started, pairing a second device, writing a question, exam packs, self-hosting on SQLite or Postgres, and the four tests that gate every change.
- [Downloads](https://zayeed.org/downloads.html): Get Zayeed for the browser, Windows, Linux and Android, or build any shell from source with the same commands the release builds use.
- [Pricing and licensing](https://zayeed.org/pricing.html): Zayeed is in preview and nothing is purchasable yet: the intended shape — free tier, team plans, per-candidate institution licensing — and what is firm.
- [Try Zayeed](https://zayeed.org/demo.html): Ten minutes to judge a marker: answer a paper wrongly on purpose, read the reason beside every mark, then take it offline and onto a second device.
- [FAQ](https://zayeed.org/faq.html): Does it work offline, will a phone and a laptop give the same mark, can it grade short answers, how do access arrangements work, and can you host it yourself.
- [Contact](https://zayeed.org/contact.html): Email Zayeed about the grading grammar, an institution licence, an air-gapped deployment, a bug, a security report or an accessibility barrier.
- [Video guide](https://zayeed.org/help-video.html): A 38:36 chaptered walkthrough of Zayeed on the running application: authoring, the answer tester, sitting a paper offline, and marking with reasons.

## Machine-readable

- [features.json](https://zayeed.org/features.json) — architecture, platforms, grading, accessibility, interop, security and pricing as structured data.
- [llms-full.txt](https://zayeed.org/llms-full.txt) — the long form of this file.

## Contact

hello@zayeed.org