AI-Powered Exam Authoring for Schools: Streamlining Question Creation and Academic Workflows

About the Client

The client is a school group with a strong focus on academic rigour and quality assurance. Their academic leadership wanted every exam, across classes, subjects and languages, to look and feel the same, follow the school’s approved style, and pass through a formal review before it reached the children. Before working with Sigma, much of this work was done in personal copies of Word documents shared over email, with the format depending on whoever was preparing the paper for that term. The client knew that to scale across classes 1 through 12 and multiple language mediums (English, Hindi and other foreign languages) they needed a proper system, not more spreadsheets.

Project Overview

Sigma collaborated with the one of the leading schools in Bangalore, India academic and technology teams to build a Teacher Portal, a single web platform that takes the messy, paper-heavy work of preparing exams and turns it into a clean, auditable workflow that anyone in the school can follow. Teachers, Subject Incharges and principals use the same tool to author questions, build worksheets and assemble full exam-ready question papers, and to send them through the school’s review and approval chain before they are printed and shared with students.

The project covered everything from the initial product design through the full build, testing, deployment and ongoing enhancements. The result is a platform that replaces ad-hoc Word documents and email-based reviews with a structured authoring experience that is fast, consistent and trustworthy.

The Challenge

Exam preparation in a school is deceptively complex. The client needed a product that could solve several problems at once:

Build a central question bank for every class, subject and chapter, so teachers stop re-typing the same questions every term.
Let academic authors upload questions from Word and Excel — including tricky things like images and mathematical formulas — instead of typing them by hand into the system.
Give teachers an AI helper that can produce a fresh question on demand, in the right style and difficulty, when they need to fill a gap or replace a question that has been over-used.
Allow teachers to assemble those questions into worksheets and full question papers with the right number of questions, the right marks split, sections, and instructions — all on one screen.

Generate professional, school-branded PDFs that match the school’s existing exam paper format exactly, for each class and language.
Run every worksheet and question paper through a formal approval chain (subject incharge, Teachers, principal) with comments, send-back, and a clear audit trail.
Track where every question has been used, so the same question doesn’t show up twice in the same term and good questions don’t get over-exposed.
Be secure, role-aware and easy to use by teachers who are not technical, on whatever device they have at school.

In short, the client needed an authoring product that felt as simple as Word but enforced the discipline of a real publishing pipeline.

The Solution

Sigma delivered a complete Teacher Portal that admins, teachers, subject incharges and principals all use through a single web application. The product was built around four simple ideas:

One question bank for the whole school. Every question — whether typed, uploaded from Word, generated by AI, or imported from Excel — is tagged with class, subject, chapter, taxonomy level and purpose, and is available for every teacher to pull into a worksheet or question paper.
Authoring stays close to how teachers already work. Teachers can upload from Word or Excel, paste in math formulas, and use a familiar rich-text editor for tweaks. AI is available everywhere it helps, but the teacher always has the final say.

Question papers look the way the school wants them to look. The system stores per-class, per-language HTML templates, so the printed PDF is byte-identical to the school’s traditional layout — for every class from 1 to 12, in every supported medium of instruction.
Nothing reaches a student until it has been signed off. Every worksheet and question paper goes through the school’s approval chain with comments, send-back and full history; the teacher knows where their paper is at any moment.

The platform is a modern single-page web application on the front, with a secure, well-tested service layer on the back. It integrates with a leading AI provider for question generation, with the school’s email system for approval notifications, and with a maps and places service for school location capture.

Key Project Components

Central question bank — questions tagged by class, subject, chapter, type, marks, taxonomy and purpose; with a “where was this used?” history so over-used questions are easy to retire.
Question authoring from Word and Excel — bulk import of questions, options, answers, images and math formulas with a per-row preview before anything reaches the question bank.
AI-assisted question generation — on-demand generation and regeneration of questions through a leading large-language-model provider, with a side-by-side compare-and-replace preview before the teacher commits.
Worksheet builder — class- and subject-aware worksheet creation, ordered question selection, marks computation, preview, and download.
Question paper builder — multi-step flow (basic details → sections and structure → question selection → draft preview → final review) with section-level marks, instructions, and an answer-key PDF generated alongside the paper.

Per-class, per-language PDF templates — pixel-faithful question paper layouts for classes 1–12 in English, Hindi, Kannada and other mediums, rendered server-side for consistent print output.
Approval workflow with audit trail — multi-level review (subject incharge → Peer Teachers→ principal) for both worksheets and question papers, with comments, send-back, status badges and a complete approval history.
Email notifications — automatic emails to the next approver in the chain, and to the teacher when their paper is approved or sent back.
Role-based experiences — admins, teachers, subject incharges, HODs and principals all use the same app, but each role only sees what they should.
Reliable foundations — strongly-typed code end to end, a large automated test suite, structured logging, and a disciplined release process.

Benefits

A single source of truth for the school’s question bank replaces what used to be dozens of disconnected Word documents on personal laptops.
Teachers prepare papers faster. Uploading from Word, picking from the central question bank and hitting a single “Generate PDF” button has cut paper preparation time from days to hours.
Every paper looks like a school paper. With the per-class, per-language template library, every printed paper across every grade and medium follows the same approved layout — without anyone having to remember the formatting rules.
Reviews happen in the system, not in email. Teachers and principals see what is waiting for them, comment in line, and either approve or send back — and everyone has a record of who did what, when.

AI helps without taking over. The platform generates and regenerates questions through a leading AI provider when teachers want a hand, but every AI question is reviewed by a human before it joins the bank.
Question reuse is now visible. The “where was this used?” History makes it easy to retire over-used questions and keep papers fresh between terms and sections.
The platform is safe to evolve. A large automated test suite, static-analysis quality gates, and disciplined database migrations mean new features ship regularly without disrupting teachers in the middle of an exam cycle.
The partnership continues. Beyond the initial build, Sigma continues to deliver new features and maintenance, so the product keeps getting better as the school adds new exam types, new languages and new branches.

Technology Stack

Layer	Technology
Frontend	Next.js 16 (App Router, Turbopack), React 19, Redux Toolkit + Redux Saga, Tailwind CSS 4, Material UI, TipTap rich-text editor, KaTeX / MathJax / Mathlive, jsPDF, html2canvas, latex
Backend	Node.js 18+, Express 5, TypeScript 6, REST APIs
Database	PostgreSQL with Sequelize ORM (sequelize-cli migrations & seeders)
Authentication	JWT (jsonwebtoken), bcryptjs, role-based authorization middleware
AI	AWS Bedrock — Claude 3.7 Sonnet (Python child process via boto3 / anthropic SDK)
Document handling	Puppeteer (HTML→PDF, browser pool), Mammoth (Word import), Tesseract.js + Sharp (OCR), xlsx, jszip, jspdf, archiver, docx
Email & notifications	Nodemailer (SMTP)
Testing	Jest 30 + @swc/jest (backend), Jest + React Testing Library + jsdom (frontend)

Accelerate your ecommerce growth with AI-driven development, build intelligent, scalable storefronts that optimize conversions, personalize experiences, and prepare your platform for peak demand.

AI-Powered Exam Authoring for Schools: Streamlining Question Creation and Academic Workflows

About the Client

Project Overview

The Challenge

The Solution

Key Project Components

Benefits

Technology Stack

Services

Get In Touch

Follow Us

Technology

Company

Get In Touch

Follow Us

AI-Powered Exam Authoring for Schools: Streamlining Question Creation and Academic Workflows

About the Client

Project Overview

The Challenge

The Solution

Key Project Components

Benefits

Technology Stack

Services

Get In Touch

Follow Us

Technology

Company

Get In Touch

Follow Us

Let‘s Break the Ice – We’re Here to Help!