Lesson Lockdown and Exam Controls

Who this is for

Teachers using stricter control during tests, homework review, or live-session supervision.

What this page answers

• What does lesson lockdown do?
• When is a lesson locked automatically?
• What do students see when interaction is restricted?

Prerequisites

• a live or timed lesson context

Automatic locking

The most common automatic trigger is time expiry. When the allowed time runs out, the student can no longer interact with the lesson widgets.

Teacher-controlled locking

Teachers can also restrict interaction for a specific student during a session when the lesson needs to pause, close, or switch into a more controlled mode.

Exam mode

Exam mode is stricter than a normal timed lesson. It is designed for assessment-style work where students should not see whether each answer is correct while the exam is still in progress.

When a lesson is in exam mode:

• Supported Lesson Types: Supported on Homework and Exercise lessons (live class sessions cannot be exams).
• Start Briefing: Students see a start screen before entering the exam and starting the clock.
• Hidden Answer Feedback: Answer feedback is hidden while they work. Turning Exam Mode ON defaults Deferred Answer Reveal to enabled; turning Exam Mode OFF automatically turns deferred reveal off.
• Writing Draft Autosubmit: If the timer expires while a student is working on a :::writing task, the platform automatically submits the draft and enqueues AI assessment.
• Automatic Certificate Exclusivity: Active automatic certificate issuance rules are exclusive to exam lessons.
• Completion: When the exam is submitted or time expires, the lesson becomes read-only and final results are processed.

Teachers configure exam mode through the Lesson Builder exam flow or lesson settings. The settings sheet shows whether a lesson is an exam module and which exam part it belongs to.

What students see

Students keep their existing answers, but the lesson moves into a restricted state so they cannot keep changing the work.

Use this when consistency matters more than flexible retry behavior.

What "locked" actually means

Teacher grading saves are not affected by lockdown. You can still mark, annotate, and record a result on a locked lesson.

For the student, lockdown — whether you set the restrictive read-only mode yourself or a timed exam expired — means their answers cannot be changed at all. Not by the editor, not by autosave, and not from a stale browser tab left open in another window. It is not only the buttons in the interface that stop responding, so a student who reconnects later cannot slip a change through.

Retrying a writing exam

Once a writing exam lesson is passed, verified, or frozen, the student cannot resubmit it. They see a lockdown message explaining why, rather than quietly resubmitting for a new AI score on top of a grade they already have.

A retry is also refused once a person has touched the review of that result — a reviewer has been assigned, a decision has been made, an appeal has been raised, or the result is waiting in the review queue. See AI oversight and human review for how that queue works.

If a student genuinely needs another attempt at work that is already locked, reset the lesson for them instead — see Lesson Timers and Retry Controls.

Defer answer reveal

For smaller checks, you can turn on Defer answer reveal without using a full exam module. Students can answer normally, but correctness colours, icons, and answer feedback stay hidden until they submit or the timer expires.

This is useful for:

• short quizzes where students should finish all questions first
• homework that should not reveal answers immediately
• exam preparation where the full exam flow is not needed

Related pages

• Lesson Timers and Retry Controls
• Running Live Sessions
• Exam Preparation
• AI oversight and human review