Saint Louis University raises the bar on student performance with ExamSoft

High-stakes exams test more than student knowledge. They also challenge higher education institutions to administer secure assessments, grade fairly, and use actionable data to refine their teaching methods for student success.

For Saint Louis University (SLU) School of Law in Baguio City, the Philippines, tackling these challenges when preparing students for the bar examination is a top priority. As part of its digital transformation journey, the school offers online and in-person legal education, and has recently risen to become the fifth-ranked law school in the Philippines.

The two national regulators — the Legal Education Board and the Supreme Court — track the school's performance closely. Attorney Yasmine Lee R. Tadeo, the dean of SLU’s School of Law, explains that exam results directly influence the school’s reputation, enrollment numbers, and even program viability.

With so much at stake, the team began to think outside the box and move beyond traditional assessment methods.

Challenge

Ensuring academic integrity in a digital world

The School of Law faced three persistent issues:

1. Maintaining secure online and in-person testing environments
2. Providing timely, tailored grading and feedback
3. Preparing students for the pressure of the bar exam

For years, students wrote assessments by hand in notebooks. Faculty would physically collect and mark every paper, a labor-intensive process that delayed grading and led to inconsistent feedback. When the pandemic forced a rapid shift to online learning, SLU transitioned to digital tools such as Google Forms, Word documents, and PDF uploads via Google Classroom.

While functional, these workarounds exposed new weaknesses, including administrative and grading inefficiencies and greater opportunities for academic dishonesty. “Students could, in theory, copy and paste provisions of law into their exams, putting academic integrity at risk,” Yasmine says. In fact, the team devoted more time to checking for dishonesty instead of preparing the lessons. “We needed a more secure, reliable solution.”

SLU continued with hybrid learning as in-person instruction resumed, which meant the institution had to find ways to hold online and in-person students to the same standards of fairness and rigor. However, the lack of integrated analytics left educators with limited visibility into individual and cohort-wide performance, making it hard to provide targeted guidance.

“Our priority is to guarantee high performance by ensuring teaching is on point and by providing feedback,” Yasmine explains. “Without that feedback, students can’t identify what they’re doing wrong and continuously improve.”

The School of Law sought a robust solution to secure exams, streamline grading, and provide actionable insights to inform instruction. They wanted more than a platform; they needed a trusted partner to sustain long-term success.

Solution

Adopting the gold standard for bar examinations

When choosing a new solution, the School of Law identified three essential requirements: Deeper analytics to enable a more learner-centered culture, comprehensive academic integrity safeguards, and readily available customer support.

“ExamSoft was the only solution that ticked all the boxes," Yasmine says.

Their confidence in the all-in-one digital platform grew after the Philippine Supreme Court decided to administer the digital bar exam through ExamSoft, reinforcing its reliability in simulating the bar exam experience.

“If the Supreme Court trusts ExamSoft to safeguard the integrity of its most important examination, we knew it was the right choice for preparing our students,” Yasmine adds.

Results:

Embracing a modern assessment experience

Implementing ExamSoft has given the School of Law far more than secure testing. It's enhanced how they teach, assess, and support students.

For the first time, faculty could guarantee exam integrity. ExamSoft's offline delivery restricts access to internet browsers and other applications on student devices during exams and blocks screenshots to protect exam content. Remote proctoring supported by human review adds another layer of protection in flagging suspicious behavior, and Yasmine confirms that it’s now less burdensome to monitor or to proctor students during examinations.

“Online students should not be getting more leeway just because we cannot see them. With ExamSoft, the academic integrity measures applied to face-to-face and online students is the same.”

Beyond exam security, ExamSoft modernized the School of Law’s grading and feedback practices for precision and efficiency.

While law exams are primarily essay-based, faculty also use multiple-choice questions (MCQs) in procedural subjects to gain additional insights into student reasoning that often carries over into essay performance. ExamSoft’s robust MCQ analytics reveal how students interpret problems — whether they’re capable of identifying issues in straightforward questions or struggle with layered ones that require resolving multiple steps. Category/question tagging based on Bloom’s Taxonomy and levels of difficulty provides a consistent method for pinpointing where students struggled with recall, application, or evaluation.

“We can see whether a question is generating a low score because it was poorly crafted or because it’s something that we need to emphasize or explain better to our students,” Yasmine notes.

Having gained the ability to view all student responses simultaneously, faculty can quickly diagnose whether difficulties affect a whole class or certain individuals, guiding both assessment design improvements and targeted academic interventions.

Detailed direction and support deliver better student outcomes

ExamSoft’s feedback tools are central to improving student performance in SLU’s School of Law. Faculty use the Rationale feature to highlight common mistakes to students, explaining the reasoning behind correct answers and demonstrating how to craft an answer that conforms to academic and accreditation standards. The Internal Comments feature allows instructors to give personalized guidance on individual student submissions, which has become part of the faculty's workflow when returning work to students.

"We aim to be learner-centered and aligned in our assessment approach," Yasmine shares. "ExamSoft helps realize this goal and vision because it allows us to provide feedback easily for the improvement of our students and also to help us improve our test questions."

ExamSoft’s comprehensive data and granular reporting has also become central to SLU’s Academic Guidance and Intervention (AGI) program, a signature initiative in which faculty meet individually with students mid-semester to discuss performance. Faculty members use analytics and tagging to pinpoint precisely where students excel and struggle, feeding this information into meaningful conversations and a clear roadmap for improvement.

For students, every exam serves not just as a knowledge check, but as a rehearsal for the bar exam itself. Students are more confident and better prepared to perform at their peak.

Impact that extends beyond the classroom

Since adopting ExamSoft, SLU School of Law has seen measurable improvements in academic delivery, student outcomes, and institutional credibility.

• Higher bar exam success: The bar exam pass rate now exceeds 80% for first-time takers. While many factors contribute, Yasmine credits ExamSoft for boosting exam readiness and security — both of which yield stronger results.
• Faster grading and feedback: Faculty are empowered to move quickly, consistently returning quizzes and exams within university benchmarks, based on satisfaction surveys.
• Improved student experience: Familiarity with ExamSoft reduces test anxiety, which means students can focus on applying knowledge instead of navigating new software.
• Instructional and program growth: SLU Law faculty are better equipped to drive program strategy and targeted initiatives, contributing to the school's rise in the national rankings.

“More than anything, ExamSoft has given us the opportunity to teach our students to be ethical and honest,” Yasmine says. “If that translates into how they practice as lawyers, then the effort was worth it.”

With ExamSoft, SLU is shaping future generations of capable, confident legal professionals. After seeing the platform's impact in SLU’s School of Law, the university is considering an expansion of its use to support assessment and learning across other disciplines, including medicine and business.

“We are reaping the rewards of ExamSoft over and over again. It helps our students become lifelong learners and practice-ready," Yasmine emphasizes.