Article Contents
About TISS SVE
Reputation comes with responsibility, recognition comes with quality and quality comes with continuous efforts. Tata Institute of Social Sciences – School of Vocational Education (TISS-SVE) is one such institution of high repute.
TISS School of Vocational Education (SVE) was established in 2011, Since its inception provides job-specific skills to millions of youth and blue-collared workforce. TISS-SVE is committed to empower the unskilled and semi-skilled workforce to reach their full potential.
Vocational courses served by TISS-SVE are of high importance and are valued by the recruiters, the curriculum taught by TISS-SVE is of high standard that meets the needs of students to land in a job that they deserve.
Need of Secure and Simplified Assessment Process
Considering the reputation and high standard, TISS wanted to keep the exam process secure and reliable, there were a large number of students who were enrolled in the vocational courses, these students were located across the country, the students were not tech savvy and were not having high end infrastructure for appearing the online examination.
Challenges were tough and requirements were unique; Eklavvya, with its years of experience, expertise and technology could efficiently streamline the online examination process for TISS-SVE.
Here are the top goals of TISS-SVE that Eklavvya could fulfill efficiently-
Question paper generation
Using Eklavvya, TISS-SVE could generate question papers of defined pattern using the questions which were imported in the system. The question bank management was easy; faculty used to import the large number of questions in bulk in the Eklavvya system, each of these questions could be categorized under different subjects and topics. Furthermore, the difficulty level of the questions could also be defined.
This made the question paper generation an easy task, the exam administrator just had to select the subject, topic and difficulty level to create the exam question paper. The subject and topic wise sorting of questions greatly reduced the chances of errors in question paper setting.
Question paper security
TISS-SVE is an organization of employees in multiples of hundred. Larger the number of people with question paper access, more will be the chances of question paper leakage. There were different subject experts for each subject and it was not necessary to give access to all the subject experts to all the subjects.
Considering the scenario, it was necessary to restrict the access of specific question papers to a specific set of people, with a dynamic user role management system of Eklavvya, it was possible to maintain the organizational hierarchy and to restrict the access of questions to a set of people.
Certain people from administration were just supposed to view the results, so they were given a user role of “result viewer” who can view the results of candidates but cannot have access to any other part of the online examination system.
Here are certain user roles in Eklavvya system that can help the organization to restrict the online exam platform access to certain group of people-
Superadmin
This is the top most role in the Eklavvya system, Superadmin can have access to all the functionalities including question bank management, exam creation, candidate data management, organization management and result generation
Exam administrator
Exam administrator is a role with universal access of online assessment system, Exam administrator can access all the features online exam platform except “organization management”, the exam administrator cannot add other users in the system, this role is mainly oriented for school/ branch level management
Manager
Manager is the third most important role in this hierarchy for online exam system management, the managers have similar rights as that of exam administrator, manager role is intended for secondary management at college branch level
Examiner
Examiner role is assigned to those who would check the answer scripts uploaded by the candidates, examiners are assigned for paper checking by superadmin/ exam administrator/ manager. Examiners check the copies of subjective answers in online mode and award marks to the candidate. In short, examiners are responsible for digital evaluation of the subjective answer scripts.
Proctor
Proctors can access the live video and audio of the candidate during online examinations, assigned proctors make sure that the exams are being conducted adhering to norms and are malpractice free. Proctors are often referred to as Online Invigilators
Subject expert
Subject experts can import the questions in the system, they can also be referred as paper setters. They can delete, modify and sort the questions as and when needed. admins can assign specific subjects to a person so that person can import/ modify questions only for the assigned subject.
Result viewer
Person with a result viewer role can access, sort and export the results of online examinations. The result can be exported in PDF, excel format and can be shared with the vendor for printing.
Proctor admin
Proctor admin can trace the activity of assigned online invigilators, certain additional bulk proctoring features are also accessible to proctor admin. Proctor admin can perform certain actions like “bulk authentication”, “Broadcast message” as and when needed. Proctor ad,in role is for managerial people who manage the proctors of online exams.
Bulk authentication facility lets the proctor admin admit all the candidates in a single click, authentication/candidate verification is done by the proctor before the start of the examination.
Candidate manager
A technically competent person from the school academic office can act as candidate manager, and the candidate manager would be responsible for adding and managing the candidates in the online exam system. The candidate manager needs to understand the patterns of classes and subjects and needs to create the batches accordingly; the exam assignment can be done on the basis of these batches.
Exam process reliability
The exam process was conducted in a secure, malpractice free environment, the proctors were assigned who invigilated the candidates during the course of examination. Whenever any suspicious activity was observed from the candidate side, the proctor could communicate with the student through the chat box.
After multiple warnings, if any of the students did not stop malpracticing, proctors could temporarily pause or end the examination of such candidates. In case students had any issue with the exam, they could send a message to the proctor from the examination interface which helped the TISS-SVE team to troubleshoot the issues in real time.
The institute had the choice whether to save the video recordings of candidates after the completion of the examination or not. Any such saved video recordings can help to efficiently analyze and curb the malpractice.
Secure Browser Based Exams
Students were not allowed to switch the browser window or tab, if students tried to switch the window, they used to get a warning message and the same used to be notified to the proctor of the respective candidate. Apart from video, each and every activity of the candidate including IP address and Internet connection speed could be recorded in the system.
The factors collectively helped TISS-SVE to streamline the online examination process in a simplistic way with reliability as par with the physical examinations.
Ease of exam administration
The pre exam activities (Candidate data import ,question paper generation, exam creation, online exam schedule management),during exam activities ( Candidate attendance tracing, proctoring, end and resume exam) and post exam activities (result management and export) could be efficiently streamlined in an automated manner.
This saved a lot of time and manpower efforts and increased productivity with accuracy for TISS-SVE which helped them to keep on their proven excellence in maintaining the quality and reliability of their vocational courses certifications.
Here is what team TISS says about Eklavvya product and service
Thank you for providing Eklavvya platform for extracting question papers, conducting online examinations and online paper assessments.
We are using Eklavvya platform to conduct Online Proctored Examinations and to manage online answer paper assessment.
Our manual activities involved in pre, during and post examination processes have been reduced considerably. The platform is quite user-friendly and caters to our requirement of timely declaration of results. Our examination tasks have been digitized with ease. It has made our work simpler.
We look forward to a continued support from the Eklavya team
Prof. Madhushree Sekher,
Dean, School of Vocational Education,
Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai