How Prince Alfred College Ensures Safe and Secure Digital Exams

From Quizzes to High-Stakes Assessments

About Prince Alfred College

Prince Alfred College is an all-boys independent school in South Australia, with approximately 600 students in its secondary division. Nick Ladanza, Head of the English department, first came across Exam.net 2024 when searching for a secure online assessment platform to address the growing concerns around plagiarism and AI-generated content — helping to ensure the authenticity of student work.

Challenges

Nick had long felt the school’s exam process could be vastly improved. Managing hundreds of handwritten papers was not only inefficient—it felt outdated. There was also a growing concern about academic integrity, particularly with the increased accessibility of AI tools, like ChatGPT. “We needed a better way to ensure the work we were assessing was genuinely the students’ own,” Nick says.

“I'm strongly against the use of ChatGPT and AI models in the classroom—I wanted to take action to counter that.”

There was a growing concern about academic integrity, particularly with the increased accessibility of AI tools, like ChatGPT.

Solutions

Following a successful pilot within the English department, other departments quickly followed and began adopting Exam.net across the school. “We wanted something simple and reliable—Exam.net ticked all the boxes,” Nick explains. Today, over 35 teachers across the school use the platform, valued for its clear interface, ease of use, and safe exam environment.

“The highest security mode—the lockdown application—is impenetrable!”

Teachers now use the platform across a wide variety of assessment formats:

Traditional timed exams in Years 11 and 12, where academic integrity is crucial.
Segmented writing tasks completed over multiple sessions in a secure environment.
Auto-marked grammar quizzes aligned with the school’s bespoke literacy program for Years 7–9.

Lockdown mode helps create calm, focused conditions for students and confidence for teachers that they’re running safe exams.

Learn more about our security modes

Benefits

Since adopting Exam.net, teachers in the English department—and increasingly in other faculties—have found it easier to get an authentic snapshot of student understanding. Nick describes the platform as a kind of “truth serum”: because students work in a controlled environment, where what they write reflects their actual ability.

The security features are especially important. Lockdown mode helps create calm, focused conditions for students and confidence for teachers that they’re running safe exams. It also supports a distraction-free environment, which has proven especially valuable during in-class writing tasks spread over several sessions. With notifications silenced and no open tabs, students are able to concentrate fully on their work.

Student engagement has also improved. In one example, a class produced significantly more work within a single lesson on Exam.net than they had over several days of traditional instruction. Nick believes the structure and focus of the platform played a key role.

“Auto-marking through Exam.net has saved us hours,” Nick says. “And more importantly, it has helped us create consistency and structure in how we collect and review student data.”

Going Forward

Exam.net is now embedded in the English department’s everyday practices. Other departments are adopting it at their own pace and new teachers are coming onboard to the platform each month.

Nick is clear that Exam.net isn’t about replacing everything with digital tools. “We still believe in handwriting and exercise books. But where digital makes sense—like for secure, focused assessment—Exam.net does exactly what we need.”

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