Estonia's trial e-exams to prep schools for full online rollout
Estonia's Education and Youth Board (Harno) is holding trial e-exams in March and April to test schools and a new online system ahead of next year's full rollout.
Basic school e-exam trials will be conducted in the online Exam Information System (EIS), which Harno now fully manages in-house after taking over from the Ministry of Education and Research in 2025.
Two specialists were hired to oversee the system, providing greater flexibility, control and cost management. As of the end of 2025, hosting has been moved to Estonia's government cloud.
Alge Ilosaar, head of Harno's Assessment Center, said the past year focused on developing solutions for trial e-exams and improving system reliability.
"Being ready means the system is tested and operational for the exam period, though development continues," she said. Load tests and other trials will ensure the system remains functional under full exam conditions.
System and school readiness
This spring's trial exams will evaluate both the system and school preparedness. Ilosaar said they will be tracking system performance, technical capacity and the smooth administration of the exams.
"That's exactly why we're inviting all schools to take part in the trials," she said. The focus of the exams themselves, she added, is always the student, ensuring nothing interferes with their performance.
According to the official, this means the exam platform must run without delay, be secure and record answers accurately. Schools must also prepare devices and staff to manage the exam process before, during and after testing.
Because the e-exams are online, Ilosaar cautioned that risks like temporary internet or power outages or cyberattacks remain possible.
New tasks in the Estonian language exam
The new Estonian language e-exam for native speakers includes listening, writing and reading. For the first time, students must utilize a source text, a skill previously taught but not tested in exams.
"Using a source text has always been part of the state curriculum," Ilosaar noted, adding that students have practiced this in Estonian language classes as well as creative writing.
In the listening component, students must demonstrate comprehension of the text, another previously taught learning outcome now measurable through the digital platform.
Overall, Ilosaar noted, the e-exam format will allow for improved assessment of skills that were hard to evaluate on paper.
"Another advantage of computer-based assessment is that we can move toward full automation, reducing teacher workload," she said.
Centralized grading will also ensure that results are reliable and comparable, unlike written exams where in-house interpretation by schools can vary.
Learning from past trials
Past trial e-exams have highlighted technical issues that have since been addressed.
In March 2024, for example, an English language trial for nearly 6,000 9th graders ran smoothly, but a later Estonian language exam for nearly 6,700 students faced video download and system overload problems. These were resolved by moving video handling to a higher-capacity cloud.
Smaller trials of roughly 1,000 students per subject last spring confirmed the fixes.
At Tallinn Arte High School, principal Liina Altroff said her school welcomes the e-exam trials.
"It's good to take part in the trials, because then we can see what's still missing and what needs to be improved," Altroff said.
Their school's teachers should have all the information they need about the e-exams by now, she added.
Assessment model improvements
E-trials have also refined the exams' scoring model. According to Ilosaar, at least half of all exam tasks are automatically graded. Longer responses, like essays, will still require human evaluation.
"It will be the same in math: tasks requiring longer solutions will be graded by a person, while short answers will be recognized [and scored automatically] by the system," she said.
The Harno official noted that the system is improving by the year.
"Since 2022, standardized math tests have been fully automatically graded," she said, adding that efforts continue toward automating grading across all standardized testing.
The updated grading model for the 2027 e-exams will be published in March, followed by teacher training. Key changes include the use of source texts and titling.
While researchers in Estonia are exploring AI's potential to evaluate students' use of source texts, it will not be used for grading in next year's e-exams, and Ilosaar said AI scoring isn't currently on the agenda for the near future either.
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Editor: Aili Vahtla
