Introduction

With the ever-changing landscape of technology, data management systems are turning digital. This includes question bank management. Many world-renowned institutions are now using digital question bank management systems for the various advantages they provide in comparison to the conventional methods of question bank handling. These advantages can include anything from real-time data analysis to easier access for students and staff members.

A digital question bank management system is key for universities that offer a large number of courses. Each course can contain hundreds of subjects and topics, making it difficult to manage without a system in place.

A Digital Question Bank is an online interface that allows users to develop and maintain a Question Bank. By using a Question Bank management system, users can easily organize and categorize questions. With the novel question bank management systems, users can create sets of question papers with the required composition.

Not only are question bank management systems useful for teachers, but students can also benefit from them. Once the question banks are created, they can be exported as PDFs and shared with students. This way, teachers can compile a large number of questions to test candidates’ knowledge of a particular subject.

Background

The Examinations Council of Lesotho (ECoL) conducts end-to-end assessments on the behalf of the Ministry of Education and Training (MoET) of Lesotho. Ecol, just like any other progressive and reputed examination council, proactively opts for digital technologies to streamline the academic processes.

ECol serves a large number of students enrolled for various grades which makes handling question banks manually a hectic task, it is also difficult to coordinate with all the question bank contributors when it comes to manual handling of question banks.

Considering the need of the situation, ECoL adopted Eklavvya in the year 2020 and created its own digital item bank. The requirements of ECoL were unique, the Eklavvya team understood the requirements and aligned the solution to meet the niche requirements of item bank writing and management.

Implementation

With Eklavvya, ECoL could efficiently develop, maintain and repurpose the item bank as per the requirements.

Here are the top features of Eklavvya that helped ECoL to handle the question bank in a more efficient way-

1. Question type support

Ecol serves hundreds of courses to its students, this makes it essential for them to create a question bank with all types of questions including objective (MCQ), subjective (theory), fill-in blanks, multi-select, and fill-the-blank types of questions.

The digital question bank management system also supported multimedia-based questions which could be utilized for including animation, video, and large charts as part of questions, furthermore, it was possible to import questions in multiple languages, and thus; language was no more a barrier to digital question bank management system.

2. Question bank export

It was possible to export the question bank in the form of PDF, in case the faculty would need to share the practice question banks for students, it was possible to selectively export the practice questions in PDF format with a single click. The question banks could be exported subject and topic-wise.

3. Question organization and sorting

Sorting the question becomes important to efficiently manage the question bank, and the digital question bank management system enables you to do the same. For example, say, you want to check how many objective questions are available from a history subject for 2nd year BA class. You can simply do this by using various filters available in the digital question bank management system.

The sorting of the questions can be done on the basis of-

• Question type (MCQ/Theory/Multiselect/Fill in the blank/Coding)
• Question Subject
• Question Topic
• Marks Per Question

Here is how you can use a digital question bank to sort the questions-

4. Question paper generation

The user can create a question paper with the required components from the available question bank. It is also possible to create multiple sets of question papers as per the need.

Here are the parameters that are needed in order to create a question paper using the question bank management system-

• Subjects and topics from which the questions are to be taken
• Subject and topic-wise marks weightage
• Passing marks
• Required question types

5. Organizational hierarchy and user roles (Item writer, reviser, subject officer, subject manager)

Bigger the organization, the larger the number of staff members and it is crucial to maintain the organizational hierarchy. Ecol has employees working on different activities related to the question of bank management. Considering the same, for ECoL, it was important to create different roles with features to support the activity. 

To fulfill the requirement, various roles with different responsibilities were created, for example- The item writer role was given authority to create the questions, item bank supervisor and item bank manager roles can supervise and manage the question banks developed by the item writers.

Here is the feedback from the CEO of the Examination Council of Lesotho

The manual process of question bank management and Exams was a tedious task for us.

With Eklavvya Platform, we are able to streamline question bank authoring and question paper generation. it is flexible, secure, and customizable.

I  would recommend it for simplification of question bank management of examination authorities.

Mr.Mokhitli Peter Khoabane
CEO Examination Council of Lesotho(ECOL)