By CadmusLearning Objectives
- Describe what Cadmus does and how a monitored writing workspace assures authorship
- Explain how AI supports scalable oral, viva-style assessments
- Identify the concept of authentic assessment and why Cadmus favors redesign over detection
What Is Cadmus?
Cadmus is an assessment platform built for the generative-AI era. Founded in 2016 in Melbourne, Australia, Cadmus gives universities an environment where students complete written work inside a monitored workspace — one that captures the writing process and provides assurance that the student is the genuine author. The company's central thesis is that trying to catch AI use after the fact is a losing game; the better answer is to redesign assessment so that authorship and learning are demonstrated by design.
Alongside its writing environment, Cadmus offers an AI-supported oral-assessment product that makes viva-style checks — short spoken examinations of a student's understanding — practical to run at scale. Together the two products let institutions verify that students both wrote their work and can explain it.
💡Key Concept
Authentic Assessment: Assessment designed so that students demonstrate genuine understanding and skill, in conditions that make the work hard to fake or outsource. In the AI era this often means shifting away from take-home essays that a chatbot could write, toward tasks that capture the writing process, require in-context reasoning, or ask students to defend their work out loud — so the assessment measures the learner, not the tool.
What Cadmus Does
- Monitored writing workspace — students draft and submit within a controlled environment that captures how the work was produced
- Authorship assurance — provides evidence that the student is the genuine author of the submitted work
- AI-supported oral assessment — makes viva-style spoken checks scalable, so instructors can confirm understanding beyond the written page
- Assessment redesign support — helps institutions move toward task designs that are robust in an AI-saturated environment
- Integration with university workflows — fits into the systems institutions already use to set and mark assessments
How AI Is Applied
Cadmus applies AI mainly on the oral-assessment side. Traditional viva or oral examinations are a strong way to confirm that a student truly understands their own work, but they are labor-intensive and hard to run for large cohorts. Cadmus uses AI to make those spoken, viva-style checks scalable — helping institutions administer and support oral assessments for many more students than a purely manual process could handle.
On the writing side, the emphasis is less on AI scoring and more on process and integrity: the monitored workspace captures the authorship signal so that the assessment itself is trustworthy. The overarching philosophy is redesign over detection — rather than deploying a tool that guesses whether AI wrote a submission, Cadmus changes the conditions of assessment so that authentic student work is what gets produced and evaluated.
Who Uses Cadmus
Cadmus is used by universities and higher-education institutions, particularly those rethinking academic integrity and assessment in response to generative AI. Faculty, course coordinators, and assessment and integrity teams adopt it to assure authorship and to run oral checks at scale, and institutions license it centrally.
Pricing
Cadmus is enterprise education software with quote-based pricing. Cost depends on factors such as institution size, the number of students or courses, and which products — the writing workspace, the oral-assessment tool, or both — are licensed. Institutions contact Cadmus directly for a tailored quote.
Company Details
| Detail | Info |
|---|---|
| Company | Cadmus |
| Founded | 2016 |
| Headquarters | Melbourne, Australia |
| Category | Authentic-assessment and academic-integrity platform |
| Thesis | Redesigned assessment for the AI era, not reliance on detection |
| Website | cadmus.io |
Strengths
- Authorship by design — a monitored workspace assures who actually wrote the work
- Scalable oral checks — AI makes viva-style assessments practical for large cohorts
- Integrity without policing — favors redesign over accusing students based on unreliable detectors
- Process visibility — captures how work was produced, not just the final artifact
- Purpose-built for higher ed — fits the assessment and integrity needs of universities
Limitations and Considerations
- Requires assessment change — the biggest value comes when institutions rethink task design, which is organizational work
- Monitored environments raise questions — capturing the writing process invites fair conversations about student privacy and equity
- Oral assessment at scale is new — AI-supported viva checks are promising but still an evolving practice
- Enterprise-oriented — quote-based licensing is aimed at institutions, not individual educators
Key Takeaways
- Cadmus is an authentic-assessment platform: students write inside a monitored workspace that assures authorship, backed by an AI-supported oral-assessment product
- Its thesis is that the AI era calls for redesigned assessment, not reliance on detection
- AI is used mainly to make viva-style oral checks scalable, confirming that students can explain their own work
- Best for universities rethinking academic integrity and assessment design in response to generative AI
