Free Exam Management for K-12 Schools

The Community Edition is genuinely free under LGPLv3 — download the code, run it on your own server, modify it, never pay OpenEduCat a license fee. The honest catch is that you (or your IT team) host it. A 1-2 vCPU Linux VPS handling exam season for a 1,500-student school costs $10-30/month from DigitalOcean, Hetzner, or Linode. No per-student check, no phone-home, no usage cap. A few advanced features — live online proctoring, predictive analytics, SAML/SSO — are paid add-ons; the entire exam admin core (timetabling, hall allocation, paper custody, marks, moderation, results, transcripts) is in the free edition.

You provision a small Linux server, run the documented install script or Docker compose file, point an exam-office subdomain at it, and add SSL via Let's Encrypt. For board exam week we recommend three operational practices: take a database snapshot the night before each paper's marks are entered, restrict the principal and exam controller roles by record rule so teachers cannot pull question papers, and keep the host on a network the school IT team controls. If your school has no IT staff, pay an OpenEduCat partner $80-200/month for managed hosting; the software is still free, the operations are not.

The software is built around the workflow common across all of these — timetable, seat plan, sealed paper custody, raw marks, moderation, result, transcript — and lets you configure boards rather than hard-coding one. For CBSE schools in India, the marks structure and the audit log meet the documentation expectations of CBSE's Affiliation Bye-Laws Chapter 8 on examinations and the board's audit norms for internal assessment records. For IB, Cambridge IGCSE, and US state boards, the grading-scale presets and the transcript template are starting points; schools usually tune the report card layout to match local norms. We document the configuration paths and link to each board's authoritative source.

Three layers. Role and record-rule isolation: only users in the 'Exam Controller' and 'Principal' groups see paper-upload screens; subject teachers cannot, even if they wrote the paper. Storage: uploaded PDFs are encrypted at rest on your server; the database holds only metadata and a SHA-256 hash so tampering is detectable. Audit log: every view, download, and re-upload is recorded with user, IP, and timestamp — exportable as CSV. This is workflow software, not a vault — physical secrecy (printing, sealing, strong-room access) is still your process. We publish a sample SOP mapping OFQUAL-style 'maintaining the integrity of assessments' guidance from the UK and CBSE's confidential-material handling instructions into a self-host context.

Yes — exam, gradebook, attendance, fees, and parent portal are all modules of the same OpenEduCat platform, so they share one student record, one login, and one notification engine. The end-of-term report card pulls marks from the exam module, attendance percentage from the attendance module, and the homeroom teacher's comment, all in one document. If you already use a third-party SIS (PowerSchool, Infinite Campus, ManageBac), import students via CSV and push results back via CSV export; a tighter connector exists as a paid add-on. The parent portal is included in the free Community Edition.

Two paths. For the current and prior year, import the Excel mark sheet via the documented CSV template — roughly one IT person, one or two days per year of history. For older years where retyping is not worth the effort, attach scanned mark sheets and result PDFs to each student record (the document module handles attachments). The transcript view then shows current-system marks for recent years and a 'see attachments' link for older years. We publish a migration recipe and run a community forum where school admins share import scripts.