Online exams are ready to start with social distancing armour
- NSDC started reopening its online testing facilities few weeks ago in the regions marked as green zones as per the government guidelines
- Students seeking admissions for higher education and youth looking for jobs are eagerly waiting for the examination process to be resumed
While the coronavirus outbreak and subsequent lockdown have put examination schedules on hold across the country, stakeholders in the online training and assessments space are slowly resuming business after taking into consideration the health and safety requirements.
Students seeking admissions for higher education and youth looking for jobs are eagerly waiting for the examination process to be resumed. Since, all the students may not have access to a reliable computer or adequate bandwidth to take an online exam, in-centre exams become critical.
Online exams are usually conducted by certified providers in a controlled environment. Assessments ranging from entrance examinations, vocational skilling and training programs among others are conducted in carefully chosen locations that provide computers, internet connectivity and other assessment tools as required.
National Skills Development Corporation (NSDC) started reopening its online testing facilities few weeks ago in the regions marked as green zones as per the government guidelines. With a need to ensure that candidates are able to certify themselves during times of skilled labour shortage, NSDC has resumed the assessment process.
“The evaluation process took twice as much time as we implemented social distancing guidelines and thus had fewer candidates per batch for assessments. Where we normally evaluate 30 people at a time we have worked with a much smaller group,” said Manish Kumar, managing director and chief executive, NSDC.
TCS iON, a strategic unit of Tata Consultancy Services (TCS), on Wednesday announced a new standard operating procedure called Social Distanced Assessments (SD-Assessment) to conduct secure, proctored in-center assessments for recruitment and academic admissions in the post lockdown phase, while adhering to the covid safety measures.
Venguswamy Ramaswamy, Global Head, TCS iON, said, “Exam-conducting authorities are eager to resume assessments and at the same time, are anxious about the safety of students and everyone involved. We are grateful to the health experts from AIIMS and PHFI for providing invaluable inputs to our process for conducting social distanced assessments with all the necessary rigor and care.”
The SD-Assessments norms have been designed based on TCS’ experience in conducting large scale in-center exams along with vital inputs from health experts from the exam section of All India Institute of Medical Science (AIIMS) and Public Health Foundation of India (PHFI). Some of the key norms laid out include staggered, touch-free entry into the test venue, checks for symptoms along with Aarogya Setu App status verification, sanitization before entry into the exam hall, touch-free security checks, document verification, and registration among others. TCS iON conducts the railway recruitment exams, Common Aptitude Test (CAT) for admission to the Indian Institutes of Management, IIT, NEET and AIIMs entrance examinations apart from major public service assessment tests.
Aakash Chaudhry, Director, and CEO, Aakash Educational Services Limited which provides training for competitive exams like JEE and NEET noted that, “There is definitely a need for change in the existing assessment protocols following the required social distancing norms. Online testing and proctored online testing which people could adopt more going forward but the technology to conduct it at scale the technology backbone has to improve further.”
With social distancing norms in place, monitoring candidates is going to be trickier unless enough technology is available to keep an eye on them individually without involving additional supervisors, he added.
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First Published:28 May 2020, 10:35 AM IST
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