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Question & Exam BanksYour institution has written
these questions before.
TomaBank is where items live between sittings. Personal banks for the lecturer, curated banks for the department, and performance history on every question, so a paper is assembled from what already works rather than written from nothing.
Lecturer and institutional levels · Item performance history
The Waste
Good questions disappear after one use
An item that took an hour to write and performed well is filed in a personal folder, then rewritten from scratch next year by whoever inherits the module.
Items live in personal folders
The best questions in a department sit on individual laptops, invisible to the colleague teaching the same module next term.
Nobody knows what worked
Without performance data attached to the item, reuse is guesswork: a question everyone answered correctly tells you nothing.
Exposure is untracked
Reusing an item is only safe if you know where it has already appeared. Most institutions do not.
Two Levels
Private drafts and shared standards, in one place
Lecturers need somewhere to work without an audience. Institutions need a curated set they can stand behind. Both exist, and items move between them deliberately.
The lecturer’s own working set
Drafts, variants, and items still being tried out. Private by default, visible to nobody until you share them.
- Private by default, shared only when you choose
- Drafts and variants kept beside the finished item
- Organised by module, topic, and your own tags
- Promote an item to the institutional bank for review
The curated, approved set
Reviewed items a department stands behind, available to everyone teaching the module and safe to put in a high-stakes paper.
- Reviewed and approved items the department stands behind
- Available to everyone teaching the module
- Safe to draw on for high-stakes papers
- Ownership and review dates recorded on each item
A bank is only useful if you can find the item
Ten thousand questions with no structure is a folder, not a bank. Items carry the metadata that makes assembling a balanced paper a search rather than a memory exercise.
- Module, topic, and learning outcome tagging
- Difficulty and cognitive level recorded per item
- Full-text search across stems, options, and rubrics
- Filter by question type, marking method, or last use
- Assemble a paper by blueprint: so many items per topic and level
Every question carries its own track record
Because marking happens in the same platform, TomaGrade’s item analysis flows back onto the item itself. You know how a question behaved before you use it again.
Facility and discrimination
How hard the item proved, and whether it separated cohorts.
Distractor analysis
Which wrong options were chosen, and which were never chosen.
Exposure log
Which sittings the item has appeared in, and when.
Version history
Edits tracked without breaking sittings that already used it.
A shared bank is also a security question
Items destined for high-stakes papers are exposure risk. Access, exposure, and retirement are managed rather than left to convention.
Role-based access
Who can see, edit, approve, and use an item are separate permissions.
Review workflow
Items enter the institutional bank through named approval, not by upload.
Exposure limits
Flag or block items that have appeared too recently or too often.
Retirement
Retire an item from future use while keeping it on past exam records.
Ownership
Every item names an author and a reviewer, with dates.
Audit trail
Creation, edits, approvals, and use all recorded on the item.
Bring what you already have
Nothing needs rewriting to be reused. Existing items are imported during onboarding, from wherever they currently sit.
Where it sits in the platform
Assessment Studio
Where items are written, and where banked items are pulled back into a paper.
Explore ProductTomaGrade
The marking engine whose item analysis feeds performance history back into the bank.
Explore PlatformTomaVix
The umbrella that lets one bank serve online and printed exams alike.
ExploreCommon questions
Yes. Items are imported during onboarding from LMS question pools, QTI files, Word or PDF papers, spreadsheets, and bulk CSV. Nothing needs to be rewritten to be reused.
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