Submissions & Reviews

Submissions & Reviews introduces two roles that exist only for this workflow. An External Question Author is someone outside your regular question-bank team — a subject-matter expert, a freelance writer, a department lead — who knows the content but shouldn't get access to your live bank. A Question Curator is whoever reviews what they send in before it can become a real question. Together they let you scale question authoring past your internal team without ever letting unvetted content reach candidates directly: every submission passes through exactly one quality gate before it's published.

The Two Roles

• External Question Author — access to nothing but their own submissions workspace; can author any question type but cannot see the live bank or anyone else's work. See External Question Author: Role & Responsibilities.
• Question Curator — full Question Bank access plus the review queue; the same review access is also bundled into Admin, Manager, and Editor. See Question Curator: Role & Responsibilities.

Getting an Account

There is no public sign-up for either role — an External Question Author account always has to be granted deliberately, never picked up by a stranger with a link. Two ways it happens:

• Manual (the normal path) — an admin or manager creates or edits the user in Organization → Users and assigns the External Question Author or Question Curator role directly, same as assigning any other role.
• SSO just-in-time provisioning — if your organization uses SSO, an admin can pre-map an identity-provider group or assertion to either role in the repository's SSO settings, so matching users get the role automatically on their first SSO sign-in. This is still admin-configured, not open self-service — it only fires for identities the mapping already targets.

This is a different mechanism from your Organization Portal's self-sign-up feature (see Portal → Sign-In & Access), if you have that enabled. Portal self-sign-up always creates a plain candidate-style account — it can never grant External Question Author or Question Curator, no matter how it's configured. If you want outside contributors to be able to request access themselves, you'll need your own process (a form, an email request) that ends with an admin manually assigning the role — the platform doesn't offer a self-service path into this workflow.

How a Submission Moves

A submission moves through Draft → Submitted → Approved / Revise / Rejected, with Revise looping back to Submitted after the contributor edits and resubmits. See Submission Statuses & Message History for the full state machine and what the message log records, and Reviewing & Approving Submissions for how a Question Curator works the review queue and decides between Revise and Reject.

The submission workflow lets you scale question authoring across a large contributor pool while keeping a single quality gate before any question reaches your live bank.

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