Journalism of Courage
25-year-old Anupam Mangudkar has successfully developed modules used by the Pune University to conduct online exams
Two years ago,Anupam Mangudkar gave shape to an idea that struck him during his engineering exams – “The entire process of writing the exams,and the procedures that followed,the checking,the long wait were reasons behind starting ‘We Shine Tech’. My brother Utkarsh and I had a simple aim: we wanted to make the online university exams that began a few years back simpler, says 25-year-old Mangudkar. His company has been working with the Pune University for the last two years,helping them conduct their online university exams for students of various disciplines.
Over two lakh students of the Pune university have taken their online exams on the specially designed systems. We currently have two products – IntellTest Academia and IntellTest Social. The university makes use of the first one,under which we set up the infrastructure for the university and the colleges affiliated to it. The central server is hosted by the university while the colleges host their individual servers,” Mangudkar explains. During exams,the questions are uploaded on the servers and the students can answer the papers at their respective colleges. What’s interesting is that the results are out on the very same day for the administrators. It eliminates the human errors involved in checking papers, he says.
Currently,the Pune university conducts three of the engineering exams online for the first year course,the subjects being Applied Mechanics,Basics of Electronics Engineering and Fundamentals of Programming Language. While security for these exams is a priority,they have fail safes built into the system to counter any possible problem. The main challenge of conducting online exams in India is the availability of Internet and required infrastructure. We maintain a minute-by-minute log of every student while he or she is taking the exam. In the event that a server in the college fails,we upload the saved data online through the central server and the particular college can restart the exam within five minutes,” he says. Students don’t lose out on time either as the exam restarts from the time the error occurred and the process was paused.
Through IntellTest Social,Mangudkar has developed a practice exam module for students in schools,tuitions and colleges. Coaching classes use these to help students prepare for CET,CAT,UPSC and other allied exams, he says. Last month,the duo managed the online exams for PhD entrance exams at the Pune university. We had 6000 students taking the exam and by evening,the results were out, he beams. Mangudkar is convinced that online exams are the future and this young mind is all set to work on more modules so that India can be on par with countries in the West.
