Recently, Indian Railways is conducting the world's largest online test where 9m+ candidates are expected to appear.
This has the potential to effectively wipe out corruption that has been plaguing public services recruitment ever since the inception of this country.
Ideally an online exam must have a large bank of questions grouped by complexity. Each candidate is randomly served equal number of questions belonging to such group.
1. Even if the question bank leaks, it is impossible to carry a printout of the answers to the exam hall.
(can be dumped in a mobile phone. those are banned even in the Indian cricketers' dressing rooms)
2. Cheating (copying verbatim) is difficult, because a carefully designed system can ask different questions to candidates even if they might be sitting side-by-side in the hall.
However, the format adopted by online examinations is objective question with single or multiple correct answers. It is impossible for a machine to verify the answer to a subjective question. The machine can probably assess the correctness of a subjective answer but it is hard for it to assess it qualitatively.
The question - do we really need subjective question to judge the merit of a candidate. The examiners perspective plays a vital role in this assessment. The movie that I like may not be the one that you also do.
Hence, in my opinion this seems to be the way forward. Any research aimed at machine driven assessment of subjective questions is unlikely to bear any fruitful result.
The only argument against online exams seems to be the lack of a level playing ground as everyone is not asked the same questions.
This has the potential to effectively wipe out corruption that has been plaguing public services recruitment ever since the inception of this country.
Ideally an online exam must have a large bank of questions grouped by complexity. Each candidate is randomly served equal number of questions belonging to such group.
1. Even if the question bank leaks, it is impossible to carry a printout of the answers to the exam hall.
(can be dumped in a mobile phone. those are banned even in the Indian cricketers' dressing rooms)
2. Cheating (copying verbatim) is difficult, because a carefully designed system can ask different questions to candidates even if they might be sitting side-by-side in the hall.
However, the format adopted by online examinations is objective question with single or multiple correct answers. It is impossible for a machine to verify the answer to a subjective question. The machine can probably assess the correctness of a subjective answer but it is hard for it to assess it qualitatively.
The question - do we really need subjective question to judge the merit of a candidate. The examiners perspective plays a vital role in this assessment. The movie that I like may not be the one that you also do.
Hence, in my opinion this seems to be the way forward. Any research aimed at machine driven assessment of subjective questions is unlikely to bear any fruitful result.
The only argument against online exams seems to be the lack of a level playing ground as everyone is not asked the same questions.
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