Year-long module for first-year students on Sport and Exercise Science and Health and Exercise Science degree programmes.
• Maths content taught from November to February, with exam in March.
• Approximately 150 students.
• Two Maths staff: one lecturer, one tutor. Ben McGovern from MASH helped to write questions.
Was this your first time using Numbas?
First time used summatively.
Had used for formative revision support, rather than homework.
Did you look at any other systems?
Looked at STACK a long time ago, and DEWIS.
Numbas was the only option usable at Bath. TEL team wanted a system which a wide range of people could use. Could use without any central support as SCORM through Moodle.
Academic subjects involved – e.g. maths, engineering, sciences.
Sport and Exercise Science and Health and Exercise Science degree programmes.
Main drivers for use – e.g. for formative / summative assessment; to reduce human marking load; the pandemic.
Marking load. 150 students and two staff.
Students have varied backgrounds: some with no maths since GCSE (age 16). “I really liked the idea of them being able to repeat homeworks”.
Repeatable assignments.
• Instant feedback.
• Well suited to calculation questions.
• Some appropriate questions already available.
• The exam closely resembles the homework assignments.
• Randomisation discourages copying.
• High student numbers, low staff numbers.
• Time invested pays off later (unlike marking written homework).
Because of the pandemic, the exam had to be online.
Summative in Numbas: summative assessment looks similar to formative assessment.
Aims for the Numbas material – e.g. to support transition; practice and revision during teaching; final exams.
Weekly homeworks and final summative assessment.
Homeworks released each week; remain available for more attempts for the rest of the course.
This is a service/transition course: students need this maths to use later on in the degree.
How the Numbas material was delivered – e.g. through a VLE; SCORM player or LTI tool; standalone on the web.
LTI and Moodle. Marks automatically sent to grade book.
When there were technical problems in a live assessment, I reviewed student attempts.
How much institutional support you got, or didn’t get – e.g. funding; dedicated staff time.
Central IT run LTI server.
Instructions from TEL team on setting up an online summative assessment.
Ben McGovern from MASH. MASH now supports development of modules.
Thomas decided to use Numbas for this module.
What you felt were the most important benefits of Numbas.
See drivers.
Real benefit next year: don’t have to write any new questions. Spend time now, so you have to spend less time later.
Your marking time shifts up front, with no marking to do after students submit their answers.
Maths assessment was in week 8 of 12. So no marking during the semester, and students got their marks really quickly. (released after everyone had completed the assessment, within a fortnight)
Pleased that students could look at their answers and the expected answers.
Has anyone else at your institution started using Numbas?
Lightning talk at Bath EduFest.
Gave a talk to CS department.
12 members of Bath Numbas user group.
Used by MASH for maths support – A Level maths content. On the web for students to use ad hoc.
Evidence of success: quotes from staff and students; statistics.
“I definitely want to use Numbas next year.”
“Running the test in Numbas also seemed to work well (apart from a few teething issues!) and certainly made the marking much easier!” – Sean Williams, unit convener (module leader).
Images – photos of people; screenshots of material.
Ambitions for the future – how will you develop your Numbas use further?
Want to award more partial credit.
Investigate explore mode for supporting students with lower-level maths.
Anything to say to someone else like you considering starting e-assessment?
Start with something low-stakes.
For service course: think about students’ backgrounds. e-assessment can help to bring everyone up to the required level.
Update 2026-10-30: we’re still not back online. We might be back online next week, but no promises. Once we’ve got our servers back, we’re definitely going to have a look at how and where they’re run.
Update 2026-11-09: We’ve been told that we should get back access to the editor server by the end of the day. Hopefully that means we’ll be able to restore public access by tomorrow.
A while ago, Google announced that they would be removing XSLT support from Chrome, and other browser makers followed suit. That’s put us in a tight spot, because the Numbas default theme has always used XSLT to produce the displayed exam content.
On November 17th, 2026, the stable version of Chrome will disable XSLT, so any existing Numbas exam packages will stop working.
Update 2026-10-01: I’ve removed all of the XSLT code, so new Numbas exams will work without any problems on browsers without XSLT support. This is a big change for the compiler, so if you’ve written a custom theme, look at the notes for theme authors below.
Here’s how the removal of XSLT affects existing Numbas packages.
I’m pleased to announce the release of v10.0 of Numbas.
This release adds a new “notations” feature, making it easier to configure how mathematical expressions are interpreted and displayed. There are also several new options to make question parts more versatile, and some changes to avoid rounding errors in numbers.
We’ve seen a few cases of genAI-generated .exam files on the Numbas editor. At present, generative AI tools do not have the innate ‘knowledge’ to make an exam file and will often lead to invalid or non-functional files.
If you are choosing to use generative AI to generate numbas exams, ensure that you provide links to the schema and documentation, and encourage the model to add appropriate descriptions to every variable and the question itself, including a note that it was generated by a genAI model.
Skill-enabled LLMs can use the json skill and the schema file to validate the schema, but can miss details on substituting in variables and marking algorithms, so you should always ensure to thoroughly test both correct and incorrect answers and look for edge cases, as well as ensuring question content itself makes sense.
It’s been quite a while since we last ran an online training session. We need to get back into it, so we’ve arranged one for Tuesday, 28th April 2026, 13:00 – 15:00 British Summer Time (UTC+1).
The training will take place on Microsoft Teams.
This will begin with an hour-long introduction for complete beginners, followed by an hour to look at advanced features and to answer your questions.
I’m pleased to announce the release of v9.0 of Numbas. This is a major release with an almost completely rewritten default theme, and some big structural changes inside.
We’re planning on releasing v9.0 of Numbas this Summer, hopefully on 19th August. This includes a completely rewritten user interface in the default theme, using newer browser features to improve accessibility and the user experience.
This means that some old browsers will not render Numbas exams correctly when using the new Standard theme.
The minimum supported browsers versions are as follows:
Chrome version 112 (released 2023-04-04).
Firefox version 117 (released 2023-08-29).
Edge version 112 (released 2023-04-06).
macOS Safari version 16.5 (released 2023-09-18, with MacOS Sonoma).
iOS Safari (iPhone/iPad) version 16.5 (released 2023-09-18).
Safe Exam Browser for Windows version 3.6 (released 2023-12-06).
We aim to ensure compatibility with at least 95% of browsers currently in use, as measured by MDN browser-compat-data. At time of writing, the features used by the new theme are supported by 95.82% of observed browsers.
We understand that it won’t always be possible to require students to use new browser versions straight away. For such situations, the old Standard theme will still be available within the Numbas editor, and existing custom themes will continue to use that as their base. The old theme does work with Numbas v9.0 but we won’t continue to update it and it doesn’t include any of the accessibility improvements.
Feedback on the new theme from our testers has been very positive, and we can’t wait to release it!
