Online test practice is useful for students?
What is online test?
It depends! During an online testing session, the test is downloaded to individual computers in the testing room from which candidates take the test. Once a candidate has finished and submitted the test or the prescribed testing time has elapsed, the test is automatically uploaded to be scored.
Online test practice is definitely useful right from elementary students to students who are preparing for competitive examinations or for students who are trying to enter into good engineering or good medical college. There are a lot of advantages of online test over traditional paper based testing.
Some of the advantages include:
- Online test is absolutely free. Instead of spending time and money for the coaching class one can attempt online test.
- Helps in self evaluation. Since instant scores are available students can analyze themselves and also get to know the strengths and weakness in a particular area.
- Online test can be taken up from anywhere and also at anytime
- Section wise and topic wise analysis is available. So the students can take up the test regularly and practice on the particular topics which help students to enhance the understanding.
- Machine marking is more reliable that human marking
- Partiality is not possible. Machine does not favor any student.
- For test administrators online tests mean no more test booklets, no more answer sheets, no more mail or courier services, and significantly reduced turnaround time for receipt of official results.
- The students with disabilities can also take up online tests. Blind students can take up their tests through Braille keyboard. Text can be enlarged if students face difficulties in seeing them.
Each and every technology has their pros and cons. Now let me point out few cons of conducting online practice test.
- Hard to catch cheating. For example a student can help another or share answers which help in raising scores.
- Connectivity problems: Some students take up their grades so seriously. So while writing online test the connection may fall at anytime. In some cases the students may lose their work and may also cause the test to be submitted incompletely or few answers may not get submitted properly.
- Online test is not applicable to all types of assessments. For example test which contains extended response questions.
Online test has their advantages like flexibility and lots more still there are few difficulties which are faced by test takers as well as test administrators. However with certain difficulties here and there online test will definitely play a far better role in future.