Customer Story
At the 2026 International e-Assessment Awards in London, Newcastle University was the winner of the Best University Digital Assessment Program.
The recognition marked a major milestone in a journey that began in the 2021/22 academic year. What started as a rapid response to pandemic-era take-home testing has evolved into a fully invigilated, campus-wide digital exam operation that rivals traditional paper-based testing.
To celebrate Newcastle’s win, we sat down with Inspera Co-Leads Kimberly May O’Brien and Maddie Kinnair to discuss how their small central team scaled digital testing, built an accessibility-first culture, and founded the UK Inspera User Group.
Newcastle University uses Inspera for formative assessments, and critical summative digital exams that take place in key assessment periods. There are three semesters throughout the year and as of the 25/26 academic year, Inspera accounts for around fifty percent of exams that are taking place in Newcastle’s summative assessment periods, working in conjunction with their custom web-based tool, Numbas.
Despite supporting thousands of student submissions, the core Digital Exam Service Team at Newcastle consists of five people:
“So myself and Maddy are the Inspera co-heads. We are also joined by a third colleague who’s also an assessment lead. Their name is Susan. We also have our wonderful colleague Michelle who does a lot of the administration for our team, they do a lot of like checks on question sets. We also have Katie who is our administrative assistant and they help get all our comms out to users, keep all our record spreadsheets up to date. So we’re a team of five.”
While academic staff author their own question sets to utilise platform features like candidate-selected questions and stimulus materials, the central team manages all exam setup and administrative support.
“So we have our team, we help, but it is a centrally managed system. We will contact all the schools, all the module teams who have got an approved Inspera exam for their module, and we will get information from them about what sort of features they want in their exam.
We get the academic colleagues to create their question sets, we think that’s really important because Inspera has loads of really useful features. It’s what we kind of call the content creation features, whether that’s candidate selected questions, using a stimulus, using allow listing, so we think it’s important that we can educate colleagues on these features and get them to create their exam content in their question sets. Currently our team does all of the exams set up, so we’ll get the question set in and we’ll then set up all those exams. We also obviously need to make sure we support our students, so we do run demo mock exams that are available on the system for students to use and we do encourage academics to do even subject specific ones if they wish.”
We’ve used Inspera since it’ll be twenty twenty one that we used properly. It was in the twenty one-twenty two academic years that we were properly using it initially in our summative exams and pretty much since then it has grown.”
When digital exams were first introduced at Newcastle University in 2021, the focus was primarily on remote, take-home assessments. However, as campus operations normalised, the team completely re-imagined their digital delivery model, transitioning summative digital testing to in-person, invigilated examinations on campus.
In the 2021–22 academic year, digital assessments accounted for roughly 30% of exams across the University. Today, digital exams account for around 50% of all summative assessments during key testing periods, putting digital and written exams on equal footing for the first time in the institution’s history.
“We’re looking at a place where we’re actually seeing the number of written exams and digital exams being comparable, which is something our institution never had before.”
On June 9, 2026, members of the team attended the International e-Assessment Awards ceremony in London. Having previously won an award in 2020 for summative assessment, returning to win Best University Digital Assessment Program validated six years of operational growth and student-focused planning.
“It just had a really nice feeling. So we enjoy a lovely meal, we’re aware that the awards are going to be presented afterwards. When it came to the Best University Digital Assessment Programme award and they were they started reading out, they said ‘so this institution…’ and they were describing and I thought to myself ‘hey this sounds like us’ and I can distinctly remember watching Susan’s face just be like ‘oh my goodness’ and then off off we went. I think we had hoped to do a little bit of dancing as we went up!
It was truly a special experience and then it was all about getting that award back up to Newcastle on the train the next day.”
When asked what set their award application apart, both Kimberly and Maddie pointed to their focus on accessibility and reasonable adjustments.
“The focus that we put on the student experience side of things, ensuring that students have appropriate access to accessibility software so that they are not disadvantaged when doing their exam. I think that really shone through.”
Working directly with students and the University’s Disability and Wellbeing team, the Digital Exam Service developed custom protocols to exempt specific students from lockdown restrictions without compromising exam integrity. They also co-created clear, student-facing guides detailing built-in accessibility features, such as contrast modes and text enlargement, for invigilators and candidates to use in exam rooms.
“For me, I think that moment was really valuable just to kind of see the why of why it is that we’re trying to get accessibility to work in the best way for our students. That for me has always been a driver to make sure that the Inspera digital exams are as accessible as possible.”
Newcastle University is currently rolling out its Next Generation Newcastle initiative and a new leading-edge curriculum. As part of this transition, the team is focused on helping more academic modules integrate secure digital exams, exploring advanced psychometric analytics, and refining grading workflows for faculty.
“Newcastle’s gone through a lot of change. We’ve got Next Generation Newcastle. We’ve also got a leading edge curriculum being rolled out as part of the education strategy, a new strategy that we’ve got. And so at the moment, a lot of focus in the next two academic years are going to be whether new modules want to take on Inspera exams as part of this redesign of their curriculum.”
The team also maintains strict operational reviews after every testing period to drive continuous improvement.
“After every assessment period for example, we run a wash up meeting which is ourselves, the central exams office who do all of the scheduling and our IT colleagues who work to ensure that the PCs we’re using across campus all have the correct software and that there is support on the day for our students. And we will sit and we will look at what may be something that has happened, something that didn’t go quite to plan and we’ll think is that something that we could change next time? Is it a one off? If it is something we could change, right, how are we going to do that?”
Beyond their own campus, Kimberly and Maddie founded the UK Inspera User Group to connect higher education professionals across the country. The group meets to provide peer support, feature feedback, and collaborate on new and exciting ways to use Inspera products.
“I can confirm we have currently forty six members across seventeen different UK institutions at the moment and we did even just meet yesterday so it’s nice and fresh in our heads. Essentially it’s just a really nice space of group of like minded people, all Inspera users who get to come along and talk, whether it’s talking about something that maybe we’re all experiencing and trying to help each other out with trying to get a workaround to it, whether it’s sharing feedback when we’ve tested a new feature. We’ve also even had Inspera come to the user groups, on quite a few occasions, where they’ll come and present something to us. It is that group of people coming together that makes it such a nice space.”
UK higher education institutions using Inspera can join these meetings by getting in touch with the Newcastle team through their Inspera Account Manager.
Newcastle University’s success demonstrates what can be achieved when academic integrity, operational strategy and a dedicated digital assessment platform align. The Newcastle Digital Exam Service team have proven their dedication to refining student accessibility, streamlining administrative workflows, and leading peer collaboration through the UK Inspera User Group.
As higher education continues to evolve, Newcastle University remains at the forefront, driving pedagogical innovation while keeping the student experience firmly at the centre of assessment design, and we look forward to a continued partnership with Newcastle University.
