It may seem like a simple thing,
to have a question paper on a desk for a candidate.
What the public see
is that we've got a paper
that has written questions on it,
but what they don't know
is that it takes us two years
in order to come up with that paper.
The process of putting together a Cambridge English exam
starts in the city of Cambridge with Cambridge ESOL.
Well, Cambridge ESOL
is a part of Cambridge Assessment,
and Cambridge Assessment
is a department of the University of Cambridge.
Cambridge Assessment is a not-for-profit organisation.
What that basically means is that we're not part of a business.
We can maintain our integrity,
maintain our own way of thinking
of what Assessment should be doing.
One of the things
about Cambridge Assessment and Cambridge ESOL
is this interesting blend
between continuity with the past and innovation,
being up-to-date and cutting-edge.
One of the things that keeps us up-to-date and innovative
is the strength of the people that we brought in
and the knowledge base that we have here.
We're responsible
for the design and the creation
of the material that goes into question papers and tests,
and we also are responsible
for making sure that the material gets to the test takers securely,
whether it's paper-based tests or it's computer-based tests.
Every year, Cambridge ESOL
distributes thousands of computer-based tests
around the world.
We have about 320 staff working in Cambridge,
and all of those staff
are dedicated to producing Cambridge English exams.
The process of producing those exams is extremely rigorous
Questions are written by trained and experienced item writers.
We have about 200 item writers working for Cambridge.
And I thought it would be a good idea if we had a look
and decided which pieces of material...
All of our materials are pretested.
That means they're tried out in advance,
which allows us to understand how good they are.
In the last year, for example,
we received back about 170,000 pretests
from students around the world.
We then look at proofs of the question-paper material.
We need to select a writing task, as well, which we could use.
We check them and recheck them.
We have independent experts check them, as well.
We then send an instruction
for the question papers to be printed.
The information is then sent to DC10,
a massive building that's the centre
of Cambridge Assessment's logistics department.
We have a facility for printing question papers
under very secure conditions.
We have machinery for automatically packing and labelling
the question papers into secure bags,
which are then boxed up.
Millions of exam papers are stored here,
ready to be pulled down and dispatched
at a moment's notice.
In the course of a year,
there's about 18 million exam papers that come out of here.
12 million of those belong to ESOL.
The exams are then sent
to over 150 countries around the world.
The final part of the process, the monitoring evaluation,
is highly, highly important
to the ongoing improvement of the examination system.
Nowadays, examination sessions happen throughout the year.
In addition to that, there are a number of tests that we run
which are on-demand.
The great thing
is that so many people have heard of us,
and so many people know that they can really trust the exams
that come out of Cambridge.
We follow a quality management system here.
One of the main principles is that it's never good enough.
You can always find ways to improve.