Managing evaluation components during Covid-19 disruption

"The starting point of all achievements is desire."

- Napoleon Hill

The Covid–19 pandemic has changed the status quo in every sphere of life, and educational institutions are no exception. Academic calendars, admissions, examinations, internships and placements have been severely affected. Traditional classroom-based learning is shifting to online mode in a compulsive environment where there is complete or partial shutdown across the world. The complexity surrounding us immediately after Covid-19 was when things would be normal and how we would conduct exams for the students.

Examinations are a critical part of the academic cycle. The correct assessment is the key to understand the progress of students' knowledge and conceptual understanding. The picture was clear that it will take months for the students to come back to the campus, but the sessions will start by July 2020 at least for the second year and mid-august for the first year. With the commencement of the session, the evaluation will follow soon. So, the Controller of Examination (CoE) office started planning to explore various options to conduct exams. Conducting exams in the online mode was something that we have not done as an institute before. We required a framework for conducting online examinations. The search for the Artificial Intelligence enabled platform began. The criterion for evaluating the platform included –user-friendliness, interface compatibility, data usage, data storage etc. Another critical criterion taken into consideration was how effectively the remote proctoring could be done. An effective way of doing it is if the screen can be shared or alerts can be generated, it becomes easy for the proctors to raise the alarm when the students engage in any malpractices. At least four to five vendors were contacted who have been well-known players in this space.

Examinations are a critical part of the academic cycle. The correct assessment is the key to understand the progress of students' knowledge and conceptual understanding.

Eventually, we partnered with EKLAVVYA – a platform for online assessment. It has artificial Intelligence-powered Remote Proctoring technology which will help conduct an exam even for the remote candidate. For the platform's smooth functioning at our level, the students and staff were trained to use it. The students did have problems in the initial days because they now must type their answers online from pen and paper. Many complained about the synchronization of their thoughts and how they had to type the answer. Many students felt the space was not adequate to write answers, while the time was not enough to complete the exams. Since it is an online exam, the students required much more support for writing exams. The COE office has continuously provided that support by training them or providing continuous chat support during exams.

The faculty members also received an orientation on how to set questions for online exams and evaluate the paper online. About 136 midterm and end-term exams and 50 quizzes have been conducted through this platform, to date.

About the author

Sulagna Mukherjee holds a PhD degree in the area of Corporate Finance from the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur. She is an Associate Professor – Accounting, Economics and Finance at T.A. Pai Management Institute (TAPMI).

Note: The views expressed in this article are solely author’s own and do not reflect/represent those of Shiksha.