ExamSoft Pricing and Cost per Student

ExamSoft does not publish a price list. Programs get a quote, and the public records that do exist put the cost at roughly $17 to $50 per student per semester when students pay it, and about $42,600 a year in the one nursing and health sciences contract we could read in full, for up to 564 student licenses. The license pays for secure delivery and analytics. It does not write a single exam question, which is the part of the budget most programs forget to count.

Everything below comes from documents a school or college put online itself: nursing cost sheets, a law school fee page, a board of trustees approval and a faculty committee's minutes. Where we did arithmetic on those numbers, we say so.

ExamSoft prices in public records

Source	Who pays	Published figure	Unit
University of South Carolina College of Nursing, BSN cost sheet	Student	$17	Per semester
SMU Dedman School of Law, Examplify page	Student	$30.18	License fee
University of Indianapolis, MSN nurse leader certificate	Student	$47	Listed as a cost before starting classes
Maysville Community and Technical College (KY), nursing fees	Student	$50	Per semester
College of DuPage (IL), board approval, August 2022	Students in year one, then the programs	$85,141.44 total, $42,570.72 in each of years two and three	Three year contract, up to 564 licenses
University of Mississippi faculty committee minutes, December 2015	Quoted to the campus	$40, $30 or $25 per student per year by enrollment band	Campus-wide quote, not pursued

The spread is wide because the unit changes from row to row. A per-semester student fee, a license fee paid at enrollment and a three year institutional contract are not the same purchase, so compare like with like before you put any of these into a budget request.

How much does ExamSoft cost per student?

Between about $17 and $50 per student per semester in the nursing programs that print the fee. The University of South Carolina lists ExamSoft at $17 a semester on its BSN cost sheet, next to the $730 ATI line. Maysville Community and Technical College lists $50 a semester. The difference most likely reflects enrollment size and what each program negotiated, since ExamSoft prices by quote.

The oldest public quote shows how the bands work. In December 2015 the University of Mississippi's faculty technology committee recorded ExamSoft's campus pricing as $20 per student per semester for 100 to 2,499 students, $15 for 2,500 to 4,999, and $12.50 for 5,000 to 7,499. The committee decided not to buy a campus license, and the figures are ten years old, so treat them as the shape of the price rather than the price.

How much does Examplify cost?

Examplify is the ExamSoft app students install to sit the exam, and when a school passes the cost on, this is the fee students see. SMU's law school asks students to pay a $30.18 Examplify license fee through their exam taker account. The University of Indianapolis lists $47 for ExamSoft among the costs of its MSN nurse leader certificate. Some schools charge nothing and absorb the cost in the program budget, so a student fee of zero does not mean the license is free.

What does an ExamSoft contract cost a program?

The clearest public example is the College of DuPage in Illinois. On August 18, 2022 its board approved a three year contract with ExamSoft Worldwide for the Nursing and Health Sciences division, not to exceed $85,141.44. Students paid ExamSoft directly in the first year, with no more than 340 licenses. The programs then paid $42,570.72 in each of the next two years, from the budgets of nursing, respiratory care, sonography, the speech-language pathology assistant program, the physical therapist assistant program and health information technology, with licenses expected to grow to a maximum of 564.

Divide that annual payment by the 564 license ceiling and it comes to about $75 per license per year. Divide it by the 340 licenses of the first year and it is closer to $125. That is our arithmetic, not a figure in the board document, and the real per-license cost depends on how many students actually enrolled. The same document notes that faculty use ExamSoft at no extra license cost, and that the college received only one proposal to its request.

What the ExamSoft license does not include

ExamSoft stores questions, delivers exams offline through Examplify, locks the device during the exam and reports performance by category. All of that assumes a question bank already exists. In a nursing program the bank is built by faculty, usually from recorded lectures, one evening at a time, and the hours are real even though they never appear on the contract.

That is the job VidQuiz does. Paste a YouTube link, or a Panopto, Kaltura, Zoom or Teams link with the transcript the platform produced, and it drafts multiple choice, true or false and short answer items with three plausible wrong answers, a rationale and the minute of the lecture each question tests. You edit every line, then export a Word file built to ExamSoft's own Enterprise Portal import rules. Our ExamSoft question import format page shows that file line by line, with the keys starred and the rationale paragraphs in place.

Pharmacology items deserve a second look before they go into a secure exam. When a rationale turns on a drug interaction or a contraindication, faculty often confirm the interaction and dosing guidance in a clinical reference before approving the item, the same way they would for a question they wrote by hand.

Is ExamSoft worth it for a small nursing program?

It depends on what the program needs from secure testing. ExamSoft's case rests on offline delivery, device lockdown and item analysis tied to categories that map to accreditation reporting, and the College of DuPage board approval lists exactly those reasons. If a program mostly needs weekly quizzes inside Canvas or Blackboard, the learning system and a lockdown browser may cover it. Our comparison of the best AI nursing question generator options covers the writing side of either choice.

Whichever way the program goes, the questions can move. A VidQuiz quiz exports to ExamSoft, Respondus, QTI 1.2 for Canvas and Brightspace, Blackboard and Moodle, so a bank written once is not tied to the license you buy this year.

How to budget for ExamSoft

• Ask for a quote per student per year and per semester, and ask whether students pay ExamSoft directly or the program pays.
• Count licenses at your enrollment ceiling, not this year's cohort, as the College of DuPage did.
• Ask what happens to the question bank and its category tags if the program leaves.
• Put faculty time for writing questions in the same budget line. It is usually the larger cost.
• Check whether your college already holds a license for another program before buying a new one.

If the license is settled and the open problem is filling the bank, try VidQuiz on one of your recorded lectures. The one-time demo writes three quizzes with the real generator, and paid plans start at $49 a month, or $24 a month billed annually.

Frequently asked questions

Does ExamSoft publish its pricing?

No. ExamSoft prices by quote, so the public figures come from schools that print their student fees and from public bodies that publish contract approvals. Expect the quote to depend on enrollment, the number of programs and contract length.

Do nursing students pay for ExamSoft?

Often, yes. The University of South Carolina and Maysville Community and Technical College both list an ExamSoft fee per semester on their nursing cost sheets, at $17 and $50. Other schools cover it from the program budget, and the College of DuPage did both, students in year one and programs in years two and three.

Can ExamSoft import questions from Word?

Yes. The Enterprise Portal reads DOC, DOCX and XML files, as well as exports from Canvas, Blackboard, D2L and Moodle. It no longer accepts RTF. Each question needs a typed number, and correct answers are marked with an asterisk before the answer letter.