How to take secure digital student exams with BookWidgets and Safe Exam Browser

Administering exams digitally can be challenging—especially when students are hidden behind screens. With computers, tablets, and laptops offering instant access to the internet, it’s crucial to find effective ways to avoid students from cheating during online tests.

That’s where BookWidgets and Safe Exam Browser come in. By combining these two tools, you can lock students into a secure digital testing environment. This means no switching tabs, no launching other apps—just a focused, controlled exam session.

In this post, we’ll show you how easy it is to configure BookWidgets with Safe Exam Browser. With our built-in integration, setting up a cheat-proof digital exam has never been simpler.

📺 Be sure to check out this webinar recording, Preparing for and Taking Exams with BookWidgets– Dos and Don’ts for additional tips and tricks for creating and administering secure digital exams.

What Are BookWidgets and Safe Exam Browser?

Before diving into how to secure your digital exams, let’s quickly look at what BookWidgets and Safe Exam Browser (SEB) actually are—and how they work together.

BookWidgets is a powerful digital tool that allows teachers to create interactive exercises, quizzes, and assignments for students. While it’s widely used for testing and evaluation, its capabilities go far beyond that. From interactive learning games and worksheets to exit tickets and complete WebQuests, BookWidgets supports a variety of engaging classroom activities that make learning more dynamic—both in class and at home.

Safe Exam Browser (SEB), on the other hand, is an entirely separate tool—not part of BookWidgets. It’s a free, open-source application designed to lock down the digital testing environment on a student’s device. SEB disables system functions, browser options, and access to other apps or websites, helping educators avoid students from cheating during online exams.

When combined, BookWidgets and Safe Exam Browser create a secure, focused testing setup that keeps students on track and minimizes distractions.

ℹ️ Disclaimer: The combination of BookWidgets and Safe Exam Browser only works when the teacher shares the widget through a compatible Learning Management System (LMS), like Google Classroom, Micrososft Teams, Smartschool, Moodle, Canvas, Schoology, … Please note that Safe Exam Browser is not available for Chromebooks.

5 Steps to take safe digital exams with BookWidgets

Step-by-step video tutorial

To make things easier to follow, especially since the explanations below can get a bit technical, here’s a short video. It walks you through the same 5 steps covered below— it’s like a visual guide to help everything click more easily.

1. Install “Safe Exam Browser”

Your students must download Safe Exam Browser and install it on their computer, laptop, or iPad.

Alternatively, your school’s IT administrator can pre-install Safe Exam Browser on all managed school devices at the start of the new school year, ensuring everything is ready for secure digital testing from day one.

Note! Safe Exam Browser is compatible with Windows, macOS, and IOS. If your students are using Chromebooks or Android tablets, you’ll have to use another tool.

2. Create your BookWidgets exam

Choose a Quiz, Worksheet, or Split worksheet widget as your digital exam template. These widget types have more than 30 different question types, the ability to monitor students live and a submission of results to the teacher.

2.1 Start adding your exam questions

When deciding which question-types to utilize for your exam, consider the following questions:

• Should it be auto-graded or open-ended?
• How does it align with the learning objectives?
• How much time would it take for students to complete the question?
• Does the question-type align with the exam format?

… and from a technical point of view, when you’re using SEB, Keep in mind:

• Students can open webpages if you’ve added clickeable links in your questions, but make sure not to give away valuable information there. They have to click on the back arrow to go back to their BookWidgets exam.
  
• By adding specific YouTube videos, you give students access to everything on YouTube. It’s better to upload a video (up to 10mb) using the switch to rich text option.
• Students won’t be able to upload images in the Picture question. (So, don’t use that question.) Don’t enable student to upload a picture in the whiteboard question either. It won’t work.
• Students won’t be able to record their voice in an audio-recording question. The microphone is disabled in Safe Exam Browser (So, don’t use that question either.)

2.2 Configure the settings

The Timer, Copy-Paste Restrictions, Scratchpad are just a few examples of useful options and settings for exams.

⚙️ Some of the settings are configured on the Question level (e.g. random display of answers in a multiple choice question, the scoring weight for each question, …).

⚙️ A few settings are configured on the Reporting tab (e.g. the exam mode, which allows you to set up a time limit)

⚙️ Most of the setting are configured on the General tab (e.g. showing correct answers after submission (or not), copy-paste restrictions, random question order … )

⚙️ Lay-out changes for font and color can be made in the Preview, by clicking on the Design button.

Make sure to take a look at the right settings, fit for your exam. Students should be able to submit the exam.

3. Enable the Safe Exam Browser settings in BookWidgets

The most important settings are the Safe Exam Browser settings within your BookWidgets test.

Open your quiz or (split) worksheet and go to General. Click on Safe Exam Browser. Enable Safe Exam Browser for this widget.

Now, you’ll get a few extra input fields:

Startup Password

Students will have to enter this password when the BookWidgets exam will open in Safe Exam Browser. You’ll have to hand it to your students before the start of the exam. When students open the exam from within their LMS, SEB will open and ask them to enter the password. Once they have entered the password, the BookWidgets exam will be shown and the students will be locked in Safe Exam Browser, meaning they won’t be able to open other browsers, tabs, or tools.

Quit password

In most cases, your students don’t need the Quit Password. When students submit the BookWidgets exam (when finished), they’ll get a link allowing them to close Safe Exam Browser.

⚠️ Even though students don’t need the Quit Password, it is highly recommended to set it up by just filling in a new password. We’ll explain below why this is needed.

Why this password? The Quit password is a safety password. When students are having problems (e.g. a network issue) and they are locked in Safe Exam Browser, you can enter the password on your student’s device and quit the exam before finishing it.

When problems are solved, they open the test again and resume working where they left off.

But, if you don’t set up a Quit password, students would be able to get out of Safe Exam Browser, open other websites, and get back to the exam by entering the Startup password again. So in Summary, the Quit Password is an option that you hopefully don’t need to use very often, but that you always want to set up!

Advanced SEB Options (If You Need Them)

The menu Advanced lets you upload an .SEB configuration template for SEB-specific settings.

In most cases, teachers won’t need to touch the advanced SEB settings—the basic setup is more than enough for secure digital testing. But if you do want to fine-tune things, BookWidgets lets you upload a custom .SEB configuration file with specific settings for Windows or Mac.

Some advanced settings include support for screen reader software like Sprint, which helps students with accessibility needs. That said, one component—SprintPlus—can allow access to imported documents, so be mindful of that depending on your exam policy.

👉 Want to dive deeper? We’ve listed all the details and downloadable config files for YouTube, Skippy, Sprinter, and more in this FAQ page.

4. Share the BookWidgets exam in your LMS with students

When done, share the widget in the learning management system you are using.

This step is very important! As a teacher, you want to know if it’s really your student that is taking the exam and not someone else. For this, you must use BookWidgets in combination with an LMS, in which students have to sign in.

You can use BookWidgets in Google Classroom, Microsoft Teams for Education, Smartschool, Schoology, Moodle, Canvas, and Blackboard.

This means that using the “share link” in the BookWidgets browser will not work. Every LMS has its own proper way of sharing a widget. Take a look at the LMS integrations specific tutorials if you need help.

5. Students take the BookWigets exam

Now, students have to log in to their learning environment (LMS) and click on the BookWidgets quiz/(split)worksheet. When they have installed Safe Exam Browser on their device, the BookWidgets exam will open in Safe Exam Browser.

Students have to fill out the password they got from you. Now they can get started, answer the questions, and submit their work within a safe testing environment. After submitting, students can quit Safe Exam Browser.

… and now you just have to grade the submitted exams

Once students have completed their secure digital exam, it’s time to look at the results. The good news? Many question types in BookWidgets are automatically graded, saving you a ton of time.

For the questions that do require manual review—like open-ended responses —BookWidgets offers a range of powerful grading tools to help you work efficiently. From correction labels and commenting options to bulk feedback and filter options, there’s a lot you can do.

In fact, there are so many helpful grading features that they deserve a blog post of their own! But for now, feel free to check out our recorded webinar, where we walk you through everything you need to know about grading in BookWidgets.

💡Pro tip: If needed, you can make the feedback available only through SEB. This prevents students from taking screenshots of exam questions that you might want to reuse.

Wrap up

Combining BookWidgets with Safe Exam Browser is a great way to create a secure, distraction-free digital exam environment—and now you know exactly how to set it up in just a few steps.

If you’re curious about more technical details or want to explore advanced configuration options, be sure to check out this in-depth help article.

Before rolling it out in a real exam setting, we highly recommend testing the setup on student devices to make sure everything runs smoothly. And if you run into any questions or technical issues along the way, our support team is always happy to help—just reach out to us at support@bookwidgets.com.

Happy (and secure) testing! 🎓💻