Before digital assessment existed, running assessments meant clipboards, paper scoresheets and question papers, frantic post-exam data entry, and the quiet dread of reconciling hundreds of handwritten forms into a coherent, collated dataset. For anyone who has organised a large-scale clinical assessment, the memory will be familiar. The process worked, but it was never lean.
In 2008, Qpercom was born from a straightforward question: what if assessors could score candidates digitally, in the room, in real time? That single idea, digitising the paper scoresheet, became the foundation of everything we’ve built since.
“What used to take days of post-exam data entry now happens automatically, the moment the last assessor submits their scores and feedback comments.”
– The Qpercom principle, established 2008
The Problem with Paper
Paper-based assessments carry a hidden administrative burden that rarely appears in planning documents. Scoresheets need authoring, printing, distributing, collecting, and checking. Data needs transcribing, cleaning, and validating. Results need collating before anyone can see the picture. At scale, with hundreds or even thousands of candidates, dozens of stations, multiple assessors, each of those steps compounds. Errors creep in. Time disappears.
The real cost isn’t even just the paper. It’s the hours spent turning paper into data, and data into decisions.
A Platform Built Incrementally, by Practice
Qpercom didn’t arrive fully formed. It grew with the needs of the institutions using it. The journey from digital clinical examination scoresheet to a holistic centralised assessment platform reflects how assessment itself has evolved and how the administrative burden at every stage can be systematically reduced.
The Beginning
Digital assessor scoresheets for OSCEs. Scores captured in real time, eliminating printing, collection and post-exam data entry at the station level.
Growing
Admission interviews/MMIs brought onto the platform. Structured scoring and free-text feedback captured digitally, with instant dataset availability at close of day.
Responding
When the Covid pandemic halted face-to-face assessment, Qpercom delivered live video assessment with customisable workflows built for the full shape of an assessment day. This includes automated room logistics, scheduled reminders and automated prompts, screen sharing, session recording, and reasonable adjustments. Ad hoc rooms for briefings and debriefings, candidate waiting rooms, and one-to-one connection lists meant organisations could replicate their assessment processes digitally, not just approximate them.
Diversifying
Evidence verification and self-assessment verification workflows added. Assessors review, score, and comment on candidate submissions all in one place, with a full audit trail and built in appeals process which candidates can initiate from their Qpercom dashboard.
Reaching Further
Constructed response assessment types such as essay questions and short answer questions enable assessors to score and provide detailed written feedback through the same interface, keeping all assessment data centralised. Fully automated scoring for selected response formats e.g. Single Best Answer and Extended Matching Questions delivering instant, accurate results with zero manual scoring overhead.
Innovating
Automated proctoring and invigilation tools to support assessment teams by monitoring candidates during online exams via their webcam, microphone, and screen. Qpercom flags or records suspicious behaviour in real time, supplementing and supporting human invigilators.
Today
One platform, every assessment type.
Centralisation
The significance of centralisation is easy to understate. When every assessment type (clinical, academic, admissions, portfolio) lives on the same secure platform, the administrative gain is multiplicative. There is no switching between systems. No reconciling datasets from different sources. No re-keying data that already exists somewhere else.
For selected response assessments, the efficiency is absolute: candidates submit, the platform scores, the dataset is ready. For assessor-scored formats, the gain is structural, scoresheets are digital, timestamps are automatic, and the data is clean from the moment it is captured.
Institutions using Qpercom across their full assessment portfolio report reductions in post-assessment administration time of up to 70%.
The saving is not incidental – it is designed in.
What the Numbers Reflect
A 70% reduction in admin time is not a product claim plucked from a brochure. It is the aggregate of removing specific manual steps. Data entry after an OSCE, score reconciliation after interviews, chasing assessor forms, and building results spreadsheets from scratch. When each of those tasks is either automated or eliminated, the hours reclaimed are real and measurable.
Assessment teams using Qpercom redirect that time toward what actually requires human attention – moderation, borderline review, candidate support, quality assurance. The platform handles the mechanical. People handle the judgement.
The Lean Assessment Operation
Digital transformation in assessment is sometimes framed as a technological leap. In practice it is more incremental with a series of decisions to replace manual steps with designed ones. Qpercom’s role has always been to make those steps as small and as reversible as possible, so that institutions can move at their own pace without inheriting new complexity.
From a single OSCE scoresheet in 2008 to a centralised platform supporting the full breadth of modern assessment, the principle has not changed: the administration should never be harder than the assessment itself.
If it is, there is a better way.
