The COVID-19 pandemic has brought some considerable changes to the education sector in the past few months. With schools being shut for long, online learning has paved its way around the globe. Almost every school and college is managing classes online. Along with it, educational institutes are also conducting exams and assessments online to make things easier for the administration and learners.

So, is it really easy to conduct online exams? What are the major challenges that educational institutes face while creating online tests? And how can we overcome these challenges? Before we move ahead to answer these questions, let’s check why conducting online exams is beneficial.

Benefits of Online Examinations

Conducting online exams offers many benefits to both educational institutes and their learners. Some of them are mentioned here:

Cost-Effective

Conducting online exams can save you a good amount of money. While the exam conducting authority can save itself from paying for the venue, pen and paper, invigilators, etc., learners will save some money spent on travelling.

Time-Saving

Test centres invest a lot of time in arranging all the resources required for conducting offline exams. Managing all the questions papers and ensuring safety from paper leaks can be tedious and time-consuming. Since online exams do not need documents, it saves management time.

Online tests produce automated scores. This also reduces time in marking and generating results.

Environment-Friendly

Save paper, save trees. We all are aware of this. Since online exams do not require the use of paper and pen, they can play a signficant role in protecting the environment.

Secure

When exams are conducted online, question papers, candidates’ details, answer keys and results are stored digitally. So the chances of data loss or data leakage and fraud are very low.

Accessible

Online exams can be assigned to anyone staying in any part of the globe as long as he/she has access to the internet. This makes online exams easily accessible to all the candidates.

The above mentioned are a few among many advantages online exams have over traditional pen and paper exams. Now let’s take a look at a few major challenges you may face while conducting hassle-free online exams.

Major challenges in conducting online examinations

Process Security

When you assign online exams to the candidates, their authorization is a must. Another challenge that you may face is to ensure that your candidates aren’t using any unfair means to answer the questions. Candidates indulging in cheating and submitting plagiarised answers has become common in the past few years. To limit these malpractices, proper surveillance and security are needed.

In Coconut Learning exam portal, you can set the timer for each question or for the whole exam. With this feature, your candidates will not get enough time to cheat or get any assistance in answering questions. 

Exam tiimer helps to prevent cheating in online exams. If a candidate is unable to answer questions within specified time, system moves to next section.

Communication

Accessibility is a great advantage one can get from online exams. Even when your learners are living thousands of kilometres away, they can attend the exam and get results. But there is one constraint! That’s communication. As there is no invigilator when remote candidates are attending the online exams, they may feel lost when having queries to ask.

Coconut learning allows you to send timely notifications to your learners. You can also communicate with them via chat to covey rightful information regarding the exam.

Chat room allows you to communicate with your candidates and convey important messages regarding exams.

Preparation of question bank in a standardised format

One major challenge that exam conducting authorities face today is preparing questions in a standard format. Since every exam has its own question pattern and marking scheme, it is quite challenging to incorporate all the formats in a single exam builder.

Coconut Learning allows you to conduct any type of standard exam or assessment. Whether you have to create an objective exam or a free-form conventional test, we provide you with the in-built format. You can add questions as fill in the blanks, multiple-choice based questions or essays and categorise them according to your need. Our online learning solution also allows you to choose the number of questions, limiting attempts, or limiting time.

Marking and evaluation

Not all the teachers are technically sound. So adding an easy and automated marking system is a must while creating an online exam. Since every exam has a different marking scheme, a customised exam builder is needed with features to assign distinct marks to questions.

Coconut Learning has a customised online exam builder which allows you to assign marks to different questions. Our scoring system is automated. Once the student submits the exam, his result will be available on the screen.

Coconut Learning offers automated scoring system which saves time in evaluation.

Quality

Quality of exams is what helps your learners to assess their knowledge. Hence it is much needed to ensure that the quality of your online question papers is good enough to test the real calibre of the candidates. 

Coconut Learning offers a distinct feature, where you can track your students’ performance regularly. This will help you identify their knowledge gaps. You can also get feedback from the learners regarding the quality of exams. Such information will help you improve the quality and level of your questions.

Conclusion

Conducting online exams can be very rewarding and challenging at the same time. To reduce the administrative burden in managing these exams one must choose the right LMS that caters to the needs of examination centres.
Coconut Learning offers a very user-friendly and cost-effective LMS to create, manage and assign exams to your learners. Our customizable learning solution assists you in adding assessments in multiple formats and distributing them to the target audience. Using our platform, you can even track the progress of your learners and analyse their knowledge gaps. It is simple and easy to use. We allow you to create customised test certificates to reward your students at the successful completion of exams.

To learn more about our LMS and its distinguished features, contact our technical support team here. We will be happy to help you choose the right LMS solution for your organization.