• September 18, 2020 11:34 am
• by Sooraj

As always, knowledge is power, and nowadays, the way we harness it has changed drastically. Today, there is a greater penetration of technology in the educational sector, and Online Exam Software is one of those technologies that have the potential to revolutionize learning. Most of the educational institutions around the world are still closed and like all other industries education has also been badly hit by the pandemic. However, ensuring academic continuity has always been a priority for educational institutions. This is where the role of remote learning comes in. Now almost 90% of the educational institutions have adopted remote learning and rely on school management systems that can fulfill their end to end academic needs. The disruption caused by the pandemic and other factors such as the availability of high-speed internet has increased the shift towards online platforms for conducting examinations. In this blog post, we will list out the reasons why educational institutions require Online Exam Software.

What is an Online Exam Software?

The right online exam software helps you save time, set unified learning standards, and assess and develop students’ knowledge regularly. Modern student management systems are also equipped with online psychometric assessments that deliver teachers with a deeper understanding of their student’s strengths and the areas they need development. An online exam software or online exam portal is a software solution that usually ships with a school management system. However, you can also use this as standalone software. There are tons of online exam software available on the internet which are essentially ready to use software products that can be customized and used according to customer’s needs. Although these products deliver users with the convenience of not having the need to build software from scratch, a majority of users are still not satisfied with the experience and features these products deliver. Many of these products lack the ability to deliver better examination experience for both examiner and candidate alike. Although customers can use these on the go, it may not deliver results in the long run. This is the main reason why more educational institutions are developing their own school management software.

A typical online exam software works as dual web-based desktop software. There are 2 hybrid applications, one is for candidates to write the examination and another one is for the examiners to perform various functions that are normally involved while conducting an examination like the preparation of questions banks, invigilation, announcements, and much more. There is exam management software specifically built to meet the needs of a particular educational institution and there are even more scalable versions of it that can admit multiple schools. Let’s have a look at the second one. The latter commonly comes with 3 logins, viz: Product owner, School admin, and instructors, whereas in Student application there is only a single user that is student itself. Here, the product owner will have master control over the application. Whereas school administrators will be having control over a specific school, instructors/teachers, guests, and students.

Online Exam Software: Why do you need it?

If we leave the pandemic behind, there is still a need for these technologies as it is essential for future educational institutions to keep pace with technology advancements and prepare for future uncertainties. When compared to a regular exam, online exam software is more advanced in many ways. From hassle-free setup to easy evaluations, online exam software is the best in achieving its ultimate goal of being an evaluative tool. Apart from that, shifting exams online can also be an eco-friendly move as it ensures educational institutions to go paper-free and eliminates the need to print exam papers.

Online Exam Software: What are the features?

Online examination software can have multiple functionalities that would be helpful for both examiners and candidates alike. Below we list down some cool features online examination software can deliver when compared with a regular pen and paper exam:

1. Exam Creation

This feature allows users to create exams for subjects of their choice by drafting multiple-choice questions or by choosing questions from a pre-existing question bank by sorting and filtering. Some online exam software even supports the curation and archiving of custom questions. This kind of cool functionality ensures that exams remain agile instead of being outdated. Apart from that, the software also provides added flexibility for examiners to either save that exam or publish the results in a single flow. Exam creation modules in the software can be further customized to add more functionalities such as evaluation calculators, auto plagiarism checking, dynamic instructions, and much more.

2. Dashboards

The online exam system allows users to store and view the grades and results from multiple tests, exams, and projects in the form of a dashboard. The data on the dashboard can vary based on the users(teachers, students, guests). Examiners can view the result of the individual objective exams instantly by the click of a button. They can also view the individual performance of students, analyze the progress of students on specific subjects, student forums, evaluation reports, and much more.

3. Smart Evaluation

This feature allows instructors to evaluate administered exams on the basis of grades or on the specific needs of the institution. To make the evaluation process hassle-free, cool features can be integrated into the module such as evaluation assist, online help, auto plagiarism checks, and much more, making it less time-consuming. In the case of objective questions, the software will auto-generate the answers and for the subjective questions, instructors have to provide scores to each answer of the students. After evaluation instructors can publish the result. Students or guest users can view the exam reports soon after the result gets published. If in the case of any wrong questions provided for the exam, the system also provides a feature to adjust the score of that particular question before publishing the result.

4. Exam Rescheduling

There are rare situations that can potentially postpone examinations. This includes power failures, bad weather, administration errors, system malfunction, etc. Because of this, there is a need to add extra functionality that allows students to retake the exam.

5. Reports

Analyzing the exam results and compiling it into an actionable report is one of the most time-consuming processes involved in the pre-examination stage. This can delay feedback that is highly important to the student’s performance in their upcoming exam. However, the reports feature in the online exam software does it instantly and accurately with the click of a button.

Despite its advantages, some of the biggest roadblocks that they can encounter while developing their software are the development cost and uncertainty in the final release. However, they can bring down the development cost and time significantly by outsourcing your online exam software development to an offshore software development company that has expertise in the educational domain.