Government & institutional
GBTS
A secure online testing platform with lockdown-browser enforcement.
- Role
- Software engineer — platform and exam integrity
- Period
- 2024 — 2025
- Status
- In production
The problem
Moving a recruitment or admission test online removes the two things a physical exam hall provides for free: a candidate cannot open a second window, and everyone sits the same paper under the same conditions. Recreating both in a browser — while still marking thousands of scripts in an afternoon — is the whole problem. A platform that solves only the marking has moved the cheating, not the workload.
The approach
GBTS treats a test as a versioned artefact. A test version fixes its sections, its question assignment and its option set, so an attempt can always be replayed against exactly the paper that was sat. Attempts are sectioned and timed independently, and candidate answers are stored per question rather than as a submitted blob — which is what makes partial submission recoverable and marking deterministic. Integrity is enforced at the client with Safe Exam Browser, so the exam window is the only window.
What it does
Versioned papers
Questions, options and matching pairs are assigned to a test version, so a paper is immutable once it is sat and every attempt is scored against the exact version it saw.
Sectioned, independently timed attempts
Section attempts are tracked separately from the overall test attempt, so a section can close on its own clock without ending the exam.
Safe Exam Browser lockdown
Integration with Safe Exam Browser restricts the candidate machine to the exam itself — no second tab, no other application.
Automatic marking
Objective and matching-pair items are scored on submission, which removes the manual step that made a same-day result impossible.
Access
GBTS is institutional software. The deployment is reachable at the link above, but the system itself is behind a sign-in and its data is not public — so this page describes the problem and the architecture, with no screenshots and no client-confidential detail.