Our April Release is now live!
We are very excited to share the latest updates and improvements to Inspera Assessment, Inspera Proctoring and Inspera Originality.
We have added a dedicated Early Access section to this release and all future releases. This section will highlight Early Access features ready for you to test and provide feedback. To get involved in any early access programme, please contact your Account Manager. These requests are not handled by our Service Desk. Get involved and let us know what you think!
We are also Refreshing the Inspera Help Center! Launching on Saturday, April 18th, these changes will create dedicated sections for Inspera Assessment and Inspera Originality to help you find relevant answers faster, and will include refreshed articles and a more intuitive category layout. While the look and feel are changing, our URL structure is staying the same. All your existing bookmarks and deep links will continue to work perfectly.
In an upcoming release, we will be updating Event Log Notifications to change how push and email notifications are handled for users who trigger events. Currently, users who trigger an event may receive push and email notifications about their own actions. With this change, the triggering user will no longer receive push or email notifications for events they initiated.
Finally, the April Release Webinar will be moved to 13th April at 2pm UK / 3pm CET. If you have already registered for April, there is no need to re-register, all of your details have been carried over to the new time.
Let’s jump into the release!
April 2026 Release Notes
Inspera Assessment
What’s New
Mark by Question
Graders can now choose if they want to mark by Candidate or mark by Question. Depending on the option chosen, the UI will adapt accordingly.
Marking by Question means that the Grader first selects the question and then navigates through the candidates for that question.
Marking by Candidate looks like the current Marking behaviour: the Grader first selects the candidate and then navigates through the questions.
This feature is disabled by default but can be enabled on request. To activate this feature, please reach out to the Service Desk.
Item Bank Management Dashboard
We have launched a dedicated dashboard for Item Bank Managers to oversee settings and access for all Item Banks across the tenancy in one place - independently of authored content.
This also allows users to generate a CSV that details their item banks, with linked access groups and user roles.
We have decoupled authoring from administration. Granting a user the Item Bank Manager role no longer automatically enables Author access. This ensures administrative control remains separate from content access. For institutions that only require managers to see and control specific banks, the Item Bank Custom User Role (CUR) permission can be utilised.
This feature does not require activation, and will be enabled for all Item Bank customers following this release.
Candidate Notes and Highlights
Candidates can now highlight important text and create personal notes while taking a test. This feature is designed to help organise thoughts and focus on key information during the exam. This feature was earlier available as a closed beta and is now being made generally available.
Highlights and notes are visible only during the active test session. They are not saved or accessible after test submission. Notes and highlights are private and can only be seen by the candidate who created them.
More details found here: Notes for Candidates
Improvements:
Inherited Item Bank Access
Users can now inherit Item Bank access through nested Access Groups. These permissions are clearly identified in the Item Bank’s Access tab, where a dedicated icon marks each inherited user for full visibility.
Normalized Grading Scale with two decimal precision
A new grade scale option is available in Assessment settings, under ‘Use Grade Scale’. It calculates grades directly from marks achieved on a continuous scale from 0 to n with two‑decimal precision (e.g. 8.47).
Calculates the grade using the formula:
Grade = (Marks Scored * n) / (Max Score).
Displays the result to two decimal places (e.g., 8.47).
Authors and markers continue to work with standard point-based marking. The new option only affects how the final grade is scaled and displayed, not how marking or existing grading scales behave.
This allows the mark displayed within Inspera Assessment to align with the university’s own SIS/LMS grade calculations, allowing Inspera Assessment to safely be used as the “source of truth” for final displayed results.
Inspera Originality
Search Filters
Filters are now searchable across the whole application. This ensures that when there is a large number of values in the search dropdown, users are able to filter and find the assessment they’re searching for.
Improvements to the IO Moodle Plugin
Changes to existing behaviour:
- Translations are now enabled by assignment, rather than on by default.
- When copying an assignment with translations enabled, the copy version will also have to have translation enabled.
- When a file is uploaded in an unsupported file type, this file will now be skipped so that other queued files can be processed.
New Features:
- IO calculates both originality and similarity scores. Teachers can choose the score that better suits their needs for each assignment. System Admins can define a default value and hide/lock it like they do for other settings
- Teachers can now know the reason behind a submission that fails to process. This was previously only visible to administrators.
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It is now possible to enable the plugin for Quizzes.
Ability to allow certain characters at an Assignment Level
This feature is only available within the standalone version of Inspera Originality.
Users can now choose to ignore specific characters in the text manipulation analysis. For example, if a symbol like π appears often in a document, it can be excluded so it doesn’t affect or clutter the report.
Institutions can opt in to have only-images and short documents not process
Institutions can choose to exclude image-only documents and short documents from processing during the assignment creation process. This ensures that reports are only generated for longer submissions.
Pagination has new components
The new pagination allows the users to populate the submissions page with more than 5 submissions per page.This toggle allows for 50 submissions per page, and documents can be filtered out to streamline searching.
Originality Report will now show view count
The “Details” section of the Originality Report now includes a field showing how many times the document has been opened.
Institutions can opt in to having a URL in the student precheck and educator upload
Institutions can choose to add a custom URL in the self-upload section of Inspera Originality to direct users to their guidelines. This can be actioned via Service Desk or Account Manager.
Ability to download other institution's documents
If cross-institution student collusion is detected, users can download the matching document from the other institution where the similarity was found - provided that institution has enabled document sharing.
Early Access
Grading Workflows - Early Access
Grading Workflows will enter Early Access from 14th April. Grading Workflows allow customers to design their own unique workflow, ensuring that submissions will be allocated to the relevant graders / moderators as required. The ultimate goal is for Grading Workflows to handle all workflows, removing the need for spreadsheets.
Grading Workflows also comes with a new Grader and Group allocation UI as well as a new progress dashboard so Planners can get a true overview of how grading is progressing.
Grading Workflows is an enormous and ongoing piece of work that involves changing some existing Inspera functionality. This is still a work in progress, but in the coming months we will continue to polish and add new functionality.
To get involved, provide feedback and map Grading Workflows to your institutional approach, contact your account manager.
Drawing Question Type (New Author)
Early this year, we promoted our new drawing tool which allows candidates to draw and annotate within our other question types. This new Question Type makes the drawn submission the primary method of submission.
Educators can add images and text as a background canvas, which serves as a starting point for candidates. These images can be locked to prevent them from being moved, or unlocked to allow candidates to interact with the pre-uploaded image.
This new question type is only available if an institution is also participating in the New Author early access programme.