The Tech Opportunity for Government Institutions: Transforming Examinations Using Digital Evaluation

As the Digital India dream advances, the education sector stands to gain tremendously from digitalisation of education and transformation of the learning landscape. According to the report titled “India E-learning Market Outlook to FY’2018: Increasing Technology Adoption to Drive Future Growth”, the Indian e-learning market will grow to USD 1.2 billion by the end of 2019. Yet, despite technology rapidly pervading every other aspect of our lives, most government institutions, universities and school education boards in India continue to employ manual method of conducting examinations, evaluating answer scripts, and publishing results. How does that affect students? Not only is the manual process time consuming leading to result delays, but it is also error and fraud prone, leaving students’ future literally at the line. Many are unable to apply for competitive exams/ technical education institutions/vocational training institutes or even jobs due to delayed results or having to opt for re-evaluation. That’s not all. Sometimes tussles between the government and the teachers may also take a toll on student’s future. Take for instance, the recent evaluation boycott by Delhi University Teachers’ Association (DUTA) where results have been delayed due to the government’s failure to fulfil teachers’ demands in time. Clearly, the time is ripe for government institutions to revamp their examination process and go digital.

Digital evaluation: Revolutionizing examination delivery and assessment

Digital evaluation tools enable on-screen evaluation of answer scripts for better speed, transparency, fairness and credibility in higher education assessments. The way digital evaluation works is by digitizing physical answer sheets and uploading them to a central server, from where evaluators can access the digitized answer booklets and evaluate the papers with ease. The benefits of digital evaluation include:

• Superior security: Answer sheets are uploaded to the cloud servers in an encrypted format, with no paper-based scripts sent to evaluators. The latter then access the screen with a two-factor authentication system that ensures no unauthorized access is granted.
• Improved accuracy: The digital evaluation software automatically identifies the answer scripts to extract relevant response areas from the page into exam answer sheet folders.
• Accelerated results: Marks, grades or ranks are automatically calculated and mark sheets are generated quickly. Colleges, universities, and institutions can also generate customized reports with statistics and charts to give students/job aspirants in-depth score of the test parameters.
• Improved credibility and compliance: Being more transparent, digital evaluations command greater credibility from students and institutions and help the latter ensure 100% compliance with regulatory standards.
• Safe recordkeeping: Digital mark sheets and grade books are safely secured in the cloud, making the data safe from theft, server breakdown or any other disaster.

The Indian education sector is finally waking up to seize the tech opportunity

Given the vast scale of government examinations in India, it is imperative that digital evaluation be made mandatory in order to equip Indian students and job aspirants to compete on the world stage. The good news is, movements like “digital India education”, “digital India exam”, and “digital evaluation in India” are slowly but surely taking place. The Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE) has in recent years, taken steps to strengthen the quality of its evaluation and examination system through digitalisation. In the process, it has saved over Rs.100 crores. Several government ministries and departments are also transitioning from a pen-and-paper-based model for recruiting candidates to a computer-based test and evaluation method for all major recruitment examinations. With government as well as private institutions reaping its benefits, digital evaluation in India is poised to dominate the future of education and it will be an interesting space to watch as new trends and technologies make inroads.

MeritTrac is digitizing evaluation with TracMarks, an innovative on-screen marking solution. Examiners can now evaluate digitized answer scripts and add notes and comments as they would with a conventional evaluation method. Digitizing answer scripts, encrypting them, and distributing them electronically eliminates the risk of misplacing or losing answer scripts while in transit or otherwise. This way, MeritTrac creates the vision for “digital evaluation in India” take shape by helping educational institutions to simplify laborious evaluation tasks, improve evaluation speed, and reduce the cost for distributing answer scripts to different locations. 

Source:

• kenresearch.com
• timesofindia.indiatimes.com
• timesofindia.indiatimes.com