Online exams: test to avoid human error

“ The online examination is a good alternative for the examination department to avoid human errors. It can be a first step towards automation of the whole examination system,” said Prakash Wani,dean,engineering stream.

The online examination of first year engineering was conducted for three subjects,namely fundamentals of programming languages (FPL),basic electronics engineering (BEE) and engineering mechanics (EM). Around 26,000 students appeared for the examination.

G V Garje,chairman,board of studies of computer engineering,RK Jain,chairman,board of studies of civil engineering,Prof. R. S Talware, lecturer at VIIT and Pramod Patil ,Padmashree Dr DY Patil Institute of Engineering and Technology,were the members of core committee who conducted the examination.

Talware said the online examination was of 50 marks. “We kept a 50-mark theory paper for all three subjects in which students had to write long answers and they were given 2 hours. The online paper was also of 50 marks,but only one hour was allotted to solve the paper as all the questions were objective,” he said.

Talware said marks of both written and online examination would be considered to pass the exams. “The only issue was of availability of sufficient computers at a time. So,we decided to conduct online examination after the theory papers were over and formulated a separate schedule as per the availability of computers in different colleges,” he said.

“ For online examination we had to prepare a question bank of around 2000 questions for each of the three subjects. We could therefore give separate questions for separate sets of students to avoid copying,” said Talware.

Students also are a happy lot. “The experience of online examination was very good. It is good for developing objective and analytical thinking. Basically,it has helped clear the basic concepts,” said Atul Subhash,a computer engineering student of Padmashree Dr DY Patil Institute of Engineering and Technology.

Another computer engineering student Divya Singh said the online examination would help us prepare for exams such as CAT or GRE or TOEFL which are conducted online. “I found it interesting since we can do away with the rote system of learning and concentrate on clearing basic concepts,” she said.