With businesses, markets, industries, and education being digitized for a better future and more efficiency, the world is reshaping itself. Integration of the technologies has brought a dramatic change in the way people around the globe work and live. Slowly and steadily, these technologies are penetrating the educational sector. With the emergence of AI, ML learning and teaching approaches are undergoing changes. Online learning has opened a vast ocean of opportunities for anyone who has access to the internet and a device. Changing times will also revolutionizing the ways examinations are conducted.
The traditional method of pen and paper examinations are getting obsolete. But the practice still thrives as the digitization of assessment is yet to cross the threshold. Heaps of papers, time-consuming processes, handling and distribution of paper to evaluations are a thorough waste of time and resources.
The integration of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) has propelled the process of assessment. There is still a need to overcome the lack of organization and inconsistencies in the system, however, the processes are being optimized by adopting ICT and driving the examinations to new lengths.
Software as a Service (SaaS), cloud-based technology is highly efficient to conduct examinations.
First, there was a need to set the questions and formulate sets to avoid any discrepancies. Also, each set had its unique answer key to evaluate the students’ scores. The process would take months to complete and finally, the results would be announced. With SaaS, educational institutions have the upper hand as the software is cost-effective and updates are easily available. The question paper could disburse to the number of students and collection does not need any invigilator to go around the class and collect each and every answer sheet. When time runs out, the answer sheet is submitted by default. The whole process of conducting examinations has been simplified by the effective use of cloud-based technology.
A country like India with a population size of 130 crores, out of which approximately 30% of the population is youth, the number of exam goers is rising. For prestigious institutions, the numbers of examinees are countless. Exams such as CAT, NEET, IIT-JEE, UPSC, etc. attract a lot of attention. These examinations are still conducted at physical premises and involve logistics that are extremely difficult to manage with over a million candidates.
Cloud-based examination systems and the internet can be leveraged not only for conducting these examinations remotely but also to deliver real-time and instant assessment results. Improved accessibility to the internet and uses of multiple connected devices has made cloud-based online testing a reality. Cloud-based tests can be deployed in a matter of seconds and reused multiple times with different question paper sets. This feature is critical in designing question papers that are unique for each person taking the test so that no questions are repeated.
To further improve the accessibility of cloud-based examinations, assessment tests such as IIT-JEE, UPSC, etc. should be used as case studies and so that better infrastructure could be built to deploy them on a larger scale. Leveraging the use of cloud technology, institutions can significantly reduce the cost and time needed to conduct an examination.
