How to create a timed, sectioned online exam

What you'll need

• Items ready in your library, organized into folders with tags
• A target total duration agreed with stakeholders
• A rough map of topics or difficulty tiers to become sections
• Fifteen minutes to take your own exam in preview before publishing

Step 1: Plan the structure before opening the builder

SkillCort exams are built as sections containing pages containing blocks. Sections are your organizing unit — typically one per topic or competency — and their scoring weights flow into the final role-fit score. Pages are what the candidate sees one screen at a time, and blocks are the individual questions or content pieces on a page.

Sketch this hierarchy on paper first. Decide how many sections you need, roughly how many pages each contains, and which pages deserve their own time limit. A plan of "three sections, four pages each, two minutes per page in section two" takes five minutes to write and saves an hour of restructuring later.

Step 2: Build sections and pages in the builder

Create the assessment and add your sections. Within each section, create pages and fill them with blocks — import existing items through the picker modal, filtering by folder, tag, or item type and multi-selecting, or create new blocks in place. Keep pages digestible: three to five related questions per page reads better than one endless scroll.

Set each section's scoring weight now rather than after delivery. If section one is foundational knowledge and section three is applied problem-solving, weighting them 20/30/50 tells the scoring engine — and later the Decision Board — what this exam actually values.

Step 3: Set the total time limit

The per-assessment total time limit is the overall budget: when it runs out, the attempt ends regardless of where the candidate is. Set it from realistic pacing, not optimism — take the exam yourself in preview, note your time, and add comfortable headroom, since candidates read unfamiliar questions more slowly than the author does.

Resist the urge to make the total limit do double duty as an integrity control. Its job is to keep the exam proportional and comparable across candidates. If you are worried about candidates looking things up, that is a delivery-settings conversation, not a reason to starve everyone of reading time.

Step 4: Add per-page time limits where pacing matters

Per-page time limits are stricter and more local: when a page's time expires, the candidate is automatically moved to the next page and the expired page locks — they cannot return to it. This is exactly what you want when a later page would reveal the answer to an earlier one, or when working under time pressure is itself part of what you are measuring.

Because expiry is non-negotiable for the candidate, use per-page limits deliberately and disclose them. State in the candidate instructions which pages are individually timed and what happens at expiry. A candidate who is surprised by a locking page has a legitimate grievance; a candidate who was told in advance was simply tested.

• Use per-page limits when answer leakage between pages is a risk
• Use them when speed under pressure is a genuine job requirement
• Skip them on pages with long reading passages or complex stimulus
• Always announce them in the candidate instructions

Step 5: Configure shuffle at three levels

SkillCort can shuffle at the section, page, and block level, and every shuffle is seeded per attempt — each candidate gets one consistent order for their whole attempt, but different candidates get different orders. This makes shoulder-to-shoulder answer sharing much less useful without making any individual candidate's experience chaotic.

Shuffle blocks within pages almost always; shuffle pages within a section when the pages are independent; shuffle sections only if there is no intended difficulty ramp. If your exam deliberately warms up before the hard material, keep section order fixed and shuffle inside them instead.

Step 6: Write candidate instructions that remove surprises

Use the candidate instructions field to state the total time, which pages carry their own limits, whether locked pages can be revisited (they cannot), and what happens when time expires. Candidates perform closer to their real ability when the rules are explicit, and transparent rules are also easier to defend if a result is ever questioned.

Keep the instructions short and factual. Three or four sentences covering time, navigation, and question count beats a wall of legal-sounding text nobody reads. If the delivery will use any monitoring, candidates will additionally see the consent gate before starting — the instructions and the gate should tell the same story.

Step 7: Preview as candidate, then publish

Click "Preview as candidate" in the builder header and take the entire exam at a realistic pace. You are checking three things: whether the total limit leaves sane headroom, whether any per-page limit is tight enough to punish careful readers, and whether shuffled orderings ever produce a page that assumes context from a page that might come after it.

Fix what you find, preview again, and then publish. The publish checklist blocks Publish until required setup is complete, so treat any unresolved item as a real gap rather than a formality. After publishing, create the delivery with its name and time window and send invitations.