With the rise of online assessment platforms, manual evaluation seems like a thing of the past. These platforms take away the pain of creating relevant questions to marking and proofreading them to assess a person’s capability. With the best online assessment platforms, you can automate most of those processes.
Whether you’re looking for ICAS assessments or high school examinations, there are a few things you should look for in the platform. In this article, learn how to select the right online assessment platform for your organization in 2021.
Subjects Covered
If you’re looking for a niche assessment platform, look for the subjects or topics they have on their platform. For example, if you’re in search of an ICAS assessment platform, it should have the following subjects:
- ICAS English
- ICAS Mathematics
- ICAS Science
- ICAS Digital Technologies
- ICAS Spelling Bee
- ICAS Writing
The subjects and their content should be updated according to the latest year level.
If it’s a generic platform where you can create assessments from scratch, the selection criteria become easy to develop the assessment.
Many teachers are new to the online assessment platforms. So they will find it challenging to work with an overly complex platform. Look at the types of question patterns available, whether MCQ, essay type, or objective questions.
Proctoring Features
The next selection criterion should be proctoring or invigilation feature. Proctoring is essential in every online assessment to ensure the integrity of the exams. It also helps you ensure the reliability of the data you obtain from the evaluation.
The platform should have a screen share feed, audio/video recording, and webcam monitoring. It will help control the examination on a large scale. If a candidate is caught swindling, then invigilators can take adequate measures and impose a penalty.
When looking for proctoring features, you should understand the risks involved as well.
Reporting
After the assessment is over, you need to think about reporting. How easy is it to produce reports on the platform? Is it automatic with auto-evaluation? Question formats like MCQ, objective, and fill-in-the-blanks can be automated completely. So you’ll get the reports as soon as candidates submit their answers.
Essay and descriptive questions do require some manual intervention. So you should check what automating features the platform offers when evaluating these types of questions.
Interface and Easy Accessibility
The platform should have an easy-to-use interface for both the teachers and the candidates. It should make the job easier on both ends. The platform and the test screen should be easily accessible as well.
So before investing in a platform, take a test tour and navigate around the interface. The best platform will inherently have the simplest of interfaces.
Technical Support
When you sign up for a platform, it’s highly likely that you won’t be familiar with most of the features or components. To help you out when there’s an issue, technical support should be available and swift to act. As the final criterion, you should check how good the support team is and the options available to contact them.
When looking for an assessment platform, you should hark back to the first point of this article. Whether you’re looking for a dedicated assessment platform for specific exams like ICAS assessments or a generic platform where you can create assessments from scratch, follow the proper measures. With a suitable investment, you’ll get the right candidates.
Image Credits: Mohamed Hassan
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