Your question bank is your advantage — don't trade it for a generic one
Why the practice material a licensing school builds over years is worth more than a licensed question library, and the copyright question nobody asks their vendor.
Every so often a school asks me whether we can just supply the questions. We can't, and it is a deliberate design decision rather than a gap in the roadmap. Here is the reasoning, because it applies to your buying decision as much as to our product decision.
Your material is calibrated; a generic bank is not
A question paper that an instructor has revised over eight intakes carries information that no licensed library does. It knows which distractor your students actually fall for. It uses the phrasing your local examiners use. It weights the sections the way the real exam weights them, because it was corrected every time it got that wrong.
That calibration is invisible in a feature comparison and obvious in results.
A licensed bank is, by definition, not differentiating
If you license a question library, so can the school down the road. Your course, your instructors, and your reputation stay yours — but the practice material, which is a large part of what students experience day to day, becomes identical to your competitor's.
Schools compete on outcomes and on the sense that a program knows this specific exam. Interchangeable content works against both.
The copyright question worth asking out loud
This is the part that gets skipped in evaluations.
Exam questions are authored work, and they have owners. Licensing bodies and test developers own their items, and they are not shy about enforcing that. When a platform offers you a large library of items that read like real exam content, there are three possibilities: it is properly licensed, it is original material written to mirror the exam, or somebody scanned a copyrighted item bank.
The third case is more common than you would hope, and the risk does not stay with the vendor. Your school's name is on the course. Your students are the ones sitting an exam having practiced on material you provided.
So ask directly: where did these items come from, and what licence covers them? A clear answer is reassuring. A vague one — "our content team develops them", with no detail — is worth pressing on.
We decided not to be in that business at all. It is less to sell, and much easier to defend.
What "we don't supply content" means in practice
It means the product is a delivery layer:
- You bring the question material your program owns or has licensed.
- Photograph pages from a phone, or upload documents on the web, and each question, its options, and its answer are extracted into an editable draft.
- An instructor reviews and approves every draft. Nothing reaches students unapproved, because AI extraction is good at structure and unreliable at judgement.
- Questions are tagged to your subjects and topics, so reporting matches how you already teach.
- Learners practice on web, iOS, and Android, under your branding and on your domain.
The work you keep is the work only you can do: deciding what a correct answer is. The work you hand over is the retyping.
The honest limitation
This model asks something of you that a content-bundled platform does not: you have to have material, and someone has to approve the extracted drafts.
If your program genuinely has no question bank — a brand new school, a brand new syllabus — then a platform that ships content is a better fit, and you should go and find one. I would rather say that than sell you a delivery layer with nothing to deliver.
But if you have a filing cabinet, you are already holding the expensive part.