Course Exam Resume Options- Need Creative Solution

Hello, all.

I am building two rather large courses that earn students a professional designation and license for a couple different states. I am hoping someone can help me come up with a creative solution for resume behavior with our final exam.

One exam has very strict jurisdictional requirements. It is 150 questions with a 3 hour time limit. If the student fails the first time, they have an automatic retry after being allowed to review and study the material. If they fail the 2nd attempt, they contact our office and we review their results and provide one-on-one counseling on the areas they are struggling with and then we allow them a 3rd and final try. It is required by the state that they have this 3 hour time limit so they need to do the exam all in one setting. We can't have them go out and then resume partway through the exam. The other state isn't as strict. This exam is comprised of two case studies and essentially two tests that combine to one score. We have it set up the same way with one automatic retry, then another after we give counseling. I intended to have each case study have it's own time limit (25-30 minutes for each one, with the clock starting when the first question is launched after reading the scenario).

Here's where my hiccup is that, when I load it to the LMS to test it, if I close the course during an exam and then re-launch it, it launces back where I left off and the clock starts over, essentially killing the time limit. I have to be able to use resume for a couple of reasons... one, so we can go in as them and take a look at their results and also allow the 3rd try. What I did to allow that functionality was use variables to control which failed slide shows up depending on what try they are on. If they are on the 2nd failed attempt, we log in as them and there is a data field labeled as admin only, where we will type in "reset" which will then change an "allow 3rd attempt" button from hidden to active. Then we click that to reset it for them for a final time. The other reason is so that, if they do fail, they can close the exam, go to the past lessons and study, and then resume to the results slide which should still be storing the variables showing how many tries they are at.

Any ideas how I can accomplish this? Allow the exam to be restored when it's at the results slide and retain the variables but not allow them to restore in the middle of the timed exam?

I attached my mock exam that I've been using to try this whole thing out. I'm trying to get the format, triggers, and all that jazz in line before I build the real thing. The one here is with the 2 case studies. I am using a results slide for each case study and then a 3rd that cumulates the scores of those 2.