Refaktory built the entire platform for the Flemish admission exam for medicine, dentistry, and veterinary medicine, commissioned by Ahovoks. The system covers a candidate's full journey, from the opening of registrations to the ranking certificate that (for some) candidates can download once results are announced. What makes this an unusual engineering problem isn't any single feature. It's that everything converges on one date on the calendar for which no fallback option exists.

A registration is not a form

The registration module processes personal data, academic history, a legally binding study preference, and accommodations for candidates with a disability.

Each of these four has its own logic. The study preference is binding, which means it isn't a UI convenience but a piece of data carrying legal weight and adjustable up until a few days before the exam, with every change traceable afterward. Accommodations require an uploaded certificate, which is reviewed manually rather than accepted automatically; that review flow has to handle submissions arriving right before the deadline and rejections that need to be communicated in time for the candidate to still respond.

Two-factor authentication is mandatory, via SMS or an authenticator app. For a system holding this category of personal data on this many young people, that's not a nice-to-have.

Exam day

Candidates download their admission letter with QR code through the portal; phones aren't allowed in the exam hall, so that paper document is what counts. Payments run through Worldline, with an audit trail per reference so every transaction can be reconciled against a specific candidate and registration.

After the exam: an automated survey, then the announcement itself. Results are released for everyone at the same moment, which means the system's peak load isn't spread across a day but concentrated into the minutes right after publication. That scenario gets tested, not estimated. Candidates can then download a ranking certificate, including scans of their answer sheets.

The management system

The administrative side is even larger than the candidate-facing one. It offers full candidate management, payment tracking and reconciliation, management of exam locations, and a custom-built mail client that lets staff target communication at tightly defined segments rather than sending to everyone. Email delivery is logged in detail, including opens and device used. This is a level of tracking that exists because in a legally relevant procedure, "the candidate says they never received it" requires a substantiated answer.

The score calculation itself happens internally at Ahovoks; Refaktory supplies the data it runs on.

The constraints that shaped the build

Cloud hosting was a hard contractual requirement, limited to a specific list of named providers. Full auditability wasn't a wish either, it was a starting point: every interaction in the system is logged at the application level.

Building for a fixed public date changes your priorities in a way that's easy to underestimate. There's no soft launch, no percentage rollout, and no option to fix it in the next sprint.