Marking student work is challeging, even to the most experienced teachers and Tutors. Marking each piece of assessment or test is laborious and time consuming. It would be welcome news if schools themselves could also take the lead by cutting back on the marking of books to free teachers to work smarter to facilitate actual teaching and learning in classrooms.
In the UK, research shows that teachers spend just a third of their working week instructing pupils, despite working longer hours than their counterparts in other European countries.
This demonstrates that teachers are overwhelmed with excessive workload, sometimes having to mark up to 100 books a day, write comments in different colours and carry out multiple risk assessment exercises for school trips. Average teachers spent just 20 hours a week in the classroom, with the remainder spent on admin, lesson preparing and marking.
With the advent of technology, online test should be the obvious answer to this to this problem. Here are some obvious advantages of online tests
- Students can take the test anywhere-home, school, cyber etc
- Automatic grading
- Recycling of test materials
- Online data storage facilitates testing management, eliminating need for storage and increasing the security of test and results through data encryption (Hovland, 2005)
- Students can receive instant feedback
- Improved accessibility for students with disabilities
- Reduction or elimination for the need for a proctor – Frees teacher’s time and resources
- Environmental benefits such as reduced paper usage
- Convenience for students in terms of time and place
- Answer data is compiled for easy analysis
- Automatic formatting of questions and options
- Use of computer-adaptive testing (method that provides harder or easier questions based on student response) (Hovland, 2005)
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