Technological advancements are steadily changing the education system worldwide. The advent of advanced learning management systems and smart classrooms has made it easier for teachers to teach effectively. It has also helped students to learn in the best possible way.
The tech-driven teaching methods allow teachers to conduct interactive learning activities in class. They can easily measure their students’ academic progress, and offer analytical insights to improve education overall. As education is shifting to online mode, there is a growing need for a reliable online examination platform too.
An online exam platform makes education more impactful for teachers, and more efficient for students. It is an excellent way to evaluate student academic performance with efficiency.
Overview of Online Examination System
An online examination system is a software solution. It helps to conduct academic exams over the Internet where students/examinees use desktop or laptop computers to give the exam. These exams are designed to be an efficient way to measure student performance without the need to conduct in-person academic assessments. It is useful to evaluate the student’s knowledge in every subject taught in class.
One of the main benefits of using an online exam platform is that it is used to offer a paperless assessment and gets instant results.
There are several types of assessments that an online examination system is helpful for, such as -
- School & college academic exams
- Competitive entrance tests
- terms/semester exams
- Campus placement tests
- Mock tests, etc.
The need for online examination systems arose with the growing popularity of virtual classrooms and online learning.
The conventional paper-based examination system worked for many decades but soon started displaying discrepancies. With traditional exam methods, the risk of cheating is increased. There are also several other problems associated with conventional assessment techniques.
The growing need for an accurate and automated assessment system gave rise to online proctoring exam systems.
Purpose of Online Examination System
Educational institutions that rely heavily on traditional assessment methods are also swiftly shifting to online exam platforms. There are numerous challenges currently facing educational institutes that use conventional means of assessment. These traditional assessment methods are tedious, time-consuming, and strife with errors.
An advanced online exam platform is needed to ensure smooth educational continuity at all times. These software solutions are a perfect combination of security, scalability, and efficiency for every type of educational institution.
An online examination system allows teachers to assess students using different types of question formats, such as objective type, multi-choice questions, essays, etc. This digital solution also allows students to give exams more easily.
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Challenges Using Online Examination System
Despite the growing need, there are several challenges that colleges and universities face in implementing an online examination system.
Here are a few commonly-faced challenges and obstacles in adopting an online exam platform for higher education institutions -
- Unwillingness to shift from conventional to modern digital evaluation system
- Lack of knowledge about efficiency of online exam systems
- Information and data security concerns of online proctoring and invigilation methods
- Misconceptions about communication efficiency with online proctoring systems
However, once you integrate it, an online examination system effectively automates the entire assessment and evaluation process.
Functions of Online Examination System
An online examination system digitzes every step of an academic exam using the Internet. Here’s a step-by-step look at how an online exam platform functions -
1. Creating the exam
The online examination software offers various options to create interactive virtual question sets. This is effective to conduct assessment using different formats, such as MCQ, objective, subjective, and brief answers, etc. The platform comes with numerous types of pre-loaded question paper formats. These can be selected with a simple click and combined together to create the most effective questions.
2. Conducting the exam
An online exam system can effortlessly conduct small and large-scale online assessments. It conducts these exams in a systematic and streamlined manner, which makes exams easier for teachers, and students alike.
The assessment platform also helps categorize students into different groups based on different categories. This way, it becomes easier to assign separate tests to different groups based on academic progress, performance, and preference. It is easier to conduct multiple numbers of online exams using this digital solution.
3. Proctoring the exam
An online proctoring exam tool is also designed to invigilate online exams with complete efficiency. There are several anti-cheating features integrated into it to ensure optimal credibility and reliability of the assessment.
The in-built proctoring feature offers a complete cheat-proof virtual environment for exams at multiple levels. Some of the advanced invigilation features include real-time online invigilation, audio-and-video monitoring, exam recording, and candidate verification.
4. Evaluating the exam
Fair assessment is crucial to ensure a completely effective exam, whether online or offline. The online examination system accurately evaluates and grades each virtual exam paper with consistent diligence. This way, it quickly assesses student performance, and provides in-depth detailed grades through auto-generated results.
Advanced assessment software also have features that allow on-screen evaluation of online exams in real-time. This is another way that online exam platforms make academic assessment easier and more effective.
Scope of Online Examination System
Ever since the global lock-down imposed by the COVID-19 pandemic, the demand for online examination software has increased multifold. Increasing numbers of schools, colleges, and universities are adopting ERP solutions. The growing awareness of enhanced efficiency and improved management by online examination systems has pushed the system to the forefront.
An online examination software is a secure software that eliminates inefficiencies, errors and obstacles in conducting academic exams. This is a highly-advanced software solution that has already proven effective in streamlining the entire online examination process.
Industrial experts predict the online education ERP market to grow by several billion dollars in the next few years. Rising numbers of schools and higher education institutions (HEIs) are integrating online exam platforms to make assessment efficient and effective.
Benefits of Online Examination System
Now we know what an online exam software is, its functions and scope. An online examination solution has several advantages and benefits for students, teachers, and administrators at schools, colleges, and universities.
Let’s check out some of the major attractive features of online exam platforms and learn their benefits -
Benefits to Educational Institutes -
- Lowers administrative burden by automating examination process so teachers can focus more time on teaching.
- Quick real-time and automated evaluation ensures prompt feedback and results for students after exam.
- Saves significant energy, time and paper required for conducting exams conventionally.
- Accurate and intuitive insights through advanced algorithms and superior computing power eliminates human errors.
- Auto-generates in-depth analytical reports on AI-powered easy-to-use dashboards on various parameters.
- Efficiency for teachers with exam evaluation allowed from anywhere, and at any time.
- Automatically calculates marks, assigns grades and maintains detailed academic records for individual students and entire class/group.
- Creates multiple question sets using different types of questions effortlessly for improved evaluation of students.
- Takes infinitely less space for storing student exams and assessment details on cloud-based server.
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Benefits to Teachers
- Easily creates effective formative type of assessment for impactful evaluation.
- Combines different types of questions, including online quizzes, surveys, and tests for optimal evaluation of students.
- Instantly evaluates and grades answers for prompt feedback to students and their parents.
- Allows to quickly generate in-depth academic reports with a single click.
Benefits to Teachers
- Offers standardized, unbiased and completely transparent evaluation of academic knowledge.
- Gives detailed pre-exam instructions for answering correctly, and ensures improved exam experience for students.
- Provides instant feedback using automated real-time evaluation features.
- Cloud-based platform allows students to access exam from anywhere, any time, and using one of many internet-enabled devices.
- Takes less time and energy for students to appear for, and take the exams online.
- Offers a completely secure and strict online examination platform.
- Allows testing knowledge and skills using different types of questions, and ensures optimal evaluation.
Conclusion,
To conclude, it is safe to say that an online examination system has benefits for everyone - students, teachers, and the education institute. The online exam platform has several advanced features that make assessment more effective for examiness and invigilators. Using ultra-modern online proctoring exam solutions, education institutes can conduct effective, unbiased, and impactful examination of students’ knowledge and skills.