Daily Times

The university administration understands that these facilities might not be available to all the students, so following decision has been taken in this regard keeping in view the COVID situation across the country. Any student who do not have or cannot arrange the required facilities required to appear in the Online Examinations (MCQ based) will be allowed to appear in Resit Examinations (face-to-face examination), which will be held after the lock down, when face-to-face classes will resume. To facilitate and train students before the examinations, Punjab University has arranged Mock Exam. The aim of the mock examination is to give experience to students, in which environment the examination will be held.

Like all system there are some pros and cons of Online Examination as. An online exam provides flexibility and security to the examination process. Once all the questions are uploaded in the system, the system can shuffle and give questions in different orders to different students. This minimizes the chance of cheating.

However, this is not possible for a paper-based exam, the paper cannot be printed differently for every student, and thus it gives leeway for malpractices.There is also a possibility for the paper to get leaked while passing it to different examination centers, this risk is mitigated by the use of an online examination system.

Result analysis is easy and instant in an online exam. The online exam can provide detailed analysis, ranking, rations subject or topic wise analysis. It is helpful for further decision making or shortlisting process

While gatherings are prohibited due to the virus, online examination provides a chance to conduct exams without breaking the social distancing protocols.

The exam surveillance can be conducted with the help of a web camera and microphone. When an exam is conducted remotely, hundreds of thousands of students can appear for the exam, without the need to spend on travel and accommodation. This also solves the problem of scheduling exams across various exam centers, hiring invigilators, providing security to these centers, etc.

The logistics cost is minimum. Examination Process is managed using technology. It is beneficial when you are looking to conduct the exam for multiple candidates at different locations.The result processing is also done online and hence the logistics cost is limited.In a paper-based exam, the logistics cost is high, since a lot of factors like exam centers, hiring invigilators, etc, has to be considered. Question papers, answer sheets need to be delivered at designated exam centers within a defined timeline.Also, there needs to be a system to collect back answer sheets from all exam centers to a central location for further processing.

Designing a question paper for a digital exam is relatively easy and it also reduces the chances of paper leakage. While designing a question paper for a paper-based exam is a daunting task. There are an endless number of logistical activities right from manual question selection, design of the paper, the printing of the paper, distributing of the question paper to various exam centers in a secure manner.An online exam gives you the flexibility to design exam papers, evaluate and grade them.However, in a traditional exam, there is little to no flexibility, last minute changes or corrections are also not possible.

As a matter of fact, result analysis is easy and instant in an online exam. The online exam can provide detailed analysis, ranking, rations subject or topic wise analysis.It is helpful for further decision making or shortlisting process. In a traditional exam result processing is a manual and huge administrative task.Many examiners are involved in the compilation of the final result. Such a result is also error-prone.

Computer-Based Tests has some apprehensions as well but one should remember No positive change ushers without significant challenges. Conducting online assessment too has its fair share of problems the two most common being cheating and technical glitches. The possibility of fraud during an online test can’t be ruled out. Also, since these assessments are cloud-based, it seems a difficult proposition to manage thousands of them simultaneously. Data security is also an added concern among education institutes. The top risk of losing test content due to inadequate data security measures implemented at the server end may compel evaluators to adopt this mode of assessment despite its evident drawback.

In a nutshell, dubbed as the “toughest” crop of graduating students, many joked that they feel like their generation was chosen by God and are really witnessing history.

The writer is a multi-platform editor with more than 12 years of journalistic experience