Reinstate a Session

Reinstating hands a completed session back to the candidate as a resumed attempt — not a fresh one. Everything they answered is preserved; they continue from where you decide, with the time you decide. It's the remedy for candidates who lost connection, suffered a power cut, were wrongly terminated, or were kicked out of a lockdown exam for exceeding its violation or resume limits.

The Reinstate Editor

• Resume point — where the candidate re-enters the test.
• Remaining time — set per test, per section, and per page, so a candidate who lost 10 minutes gets exactly those 10 minutes back — no more.
• Lockdown limits — for lockdown-enabled steps only: independent carry-over/reset choices for the violation budget and the resume budget, with an optional per-candidate override. See below.

Violation & Resume Budgets

For a lockdown-enabled step, the editor also shows the candidate's violation count/duration and resume count against their configured limits, each with its own carry over switch — independent of the other, so you can carry over violation history while still resetting the resume count, or vice versa.

• Carry over on — the count travels forward into the new attempt. A candidate reinstated this way after already hitting their limit is let back in, but with no tolerance left: the very next violation (or resume attempt, for the resume budget) ends the session again immediately, unless you also raise the limit for them.
• Carry over off (reset) — the new attempt starts at 0, same as a brand-new session.
• Override — while carrying over, you can raise (or lower) the limit itself for this one candidate. It can never be set below what they've already used — the editor blocks it client-side and the server re-validates the same floor regardless.

Reinstating is always an admin override: a session that was automatically terminated for exceeding its violation or resume limit can still be reinstated — the limits only govern whether the candidate can keep going on their own, not whether an admin can bring them back.

What the Candidate Sees

The session's status becomes Resetup — waiting for the candidate. They log in with the same credentials as before, re-enter, and the session returns to Started with the remaining time you granted. Their earlier answers are all still in place.

Rules & Bulk Use

• Only completed sessions can be reinstated — to reinstate a session that's still marked as running, end it first (see End Test Session).
• During a live exam, the Exam Monitor offers bulk auto-reinstate: it computes each candidate's lost time automatically — the fastest recovery from a venue-wide outage. For lockdown-enabled steps, it also asks once for the carry-over/reset choice (violations and resumes, independently) and applies it uniformly across the whole batch — bulk reinstate has no per-candidate override.
• Like all session actions, ineligible sessions in a bulk selection are skipped and reported.

Reinstate restores the same attempt. If you want a clean fresh start instead — new attempt, no earlier answers — ignore the broken session's result and let the candidate use another attempt (or raise their attempt limit).

Reinstate vs retake