You can now connect an AI assistant to your ICTExam server. We published ictexam-mcp, a small open source server that speaks the Model Context Protocol, so a tool like Claude can read your exams, pull a gradebook, look at per-question item analysis, and even turn a PDF question paper into a structured draft with AI. It is on npm and GitHub today, and you run it with one command.
What it does
An MCP server hands an AI assistant a set of tools it can call on its own. ictexam-mcp gives it nine of them. Six are read-only and always on:
- list exams, with their status, class and subject
- get one exam, its settings, share links and questions
- list classes and list subjects
- gradebook, the per-exam totals and student marks
- item analysis, so you can ask which questions were hardest and where the class struggled
The other three change things, so they stay switched off until you turn them on: parse a question paper with AI, publish an exam, and set it back to draft.
The part we like most
Hand it a PDF and ask it to build the exam. The parse tool uploads the paper, ICTExam reads it, and you get back the questions with their type, options, correct answers and marks, plus any mark scheme it found. In our own test a real paper came back as twenty-five structured questions. You still review before it goes live, but the tedious first pass is done for you.
Read-only until you decide
The server ships read-only. The three tools that write anything are not even registered unless you set one environment variable, ICTEXAM_MCP_ALLOW_WRITE=true. Parsing a paper spends AI credit on your server and publishing makes an exam live for students, so we put both behind that switch on purpose. It signs in with your own teacher or admin account and nothing about your password leaves the machine you run it on.
Getting started
If you have Node 18 or newer, you do not need to install anything first:
npx -y ictexam-mcpPoint it at your site with three settings, ICTEXAM_BASE_URL, ICTEXAM_EMAIL and ICTEXAM_PASSWORD, then add it to your MCP client. The README on GitHub has a ready-made config block you can paste in. Want to see the product it talks to first? Take a look at what ICTExam does.
FAQ
Is it really free? Yes. MIT licensed, source on GitHub, package on npm and listed in the MCP registry.
Which assistants work with it? Any MCP client. We test with Claude, but the protocol is open, so others work the same way.
Will it change my data by accident? No. Reading is the default and writing is opt-in through a single environment variable. Leave that off and it can only look.
Do I need an OpenAI key? Only the AI paper-parsing and essay grading use one, and that is configured on your ICTExam server, not in the MCP server.
Can it list every student’s contact details? It reads exams, gradebooks and item analysis. It is built around assessment data, not a contact export.
Where do I report a bug? Open an issue on the GitHub repo. We read them.
ictexam-mcp is one of several MCP servers we are opening up across our stack. If you run other ICT products, more are on the way.