Exams Best Practices for Computerized Assessment in Egyptian Universities

Here are some of the best practices that will make preparing for assessment in Egyptian universities conducted with Qorrect assessment system super easy and effortless (check out our “2019 in Brief: Academic Assessment Software in Egyptian Universities“).

Source: The Medicportal

Many Egyptian universities have recently adopted Qorrect, the assessment system Dr. Khaled Abd El Ghaffar, the Minister of Higher Education and Scientific Research, has commended last year.

It’s worth mentioning that the Minister of Higher Education and Scientific Research has personally supervised the unified computerized test successful trial with the attendance of over 3000 students in 21 medicine faculties in Egypt, March 2019.

The trial was held as a first step towards the actual implementation of computerized testing in all Egyptian faculties and education institutions soon.

This system allows for creating, managing, and grading tests as well as producing specified accurate reports based on these tests for later use (6 Answers to All your Questions on Computer Based Exams). But, what are the best practices that we can advise college professors and students with when preparing for using the computerized assessment system Qorrect in university tests?

First: To University Professors

1. Preparing a questions bank for the subject you teach using Qorrect and adding a variety of questions into it will help a lot organize the assessment process and make it trouble-free.

This concept was already applied in the Faculty of Medicine, Tanta University as Dr. Manal Al Baramawi, the Deputy Director of the Assessment and Evaluation Center at the university, mentioned in Qorrect’s meeting with her after its implementation.

When adding questions to the question items bank, you will find that the questions can vary from MCQs, MRQs, matching, true/false, fill-in-the-blanks, and ordering to short-answer questions and even essay ones.

How to Create a Balanced Test?

• The bank questions are what define the test’s set of standards. These standards are divided into the subject content, study curriculum (units, sections, and lessons), education objectives, students’ level of thinking and knowledge skills, the difficulty level of each question depending on how students answer it, time, type of questions, and authors.

For example, the university professor divided the curriculum into chapters, units, and sections in order to connect questions with the learning objectives of all lessons. This way choosing questions from more than one unit or chapter creates a balance in the whole test.

• The bank will let you add any number of questions into it; it is limitless. In fact, whenever the number of questions entered into the question items bank increases, the quality of the assessment process and the professor’s ability to classify it, for example, increase as well.
• In addition, Qorrect helps determine the test’s difficulty, something that was subjective before and was previously determined only by the verbal feedback the professor may receive after the test. Once the exam is over, Qorrect online assessment system provides comprehensive reports on the level of difficulty for each
• question compared to the rate of right and wrong answers.
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• Qorrect for computerized exams is the perfect system for adding all types of additional data: images, figures, or even tables.
• The system also supports mathematical equations and symbols, in case you are a science professor.

2. The second step is creating the test and generate it, and you may do this through 3 different methods:

• Manually
• Semi-automatic
• Fully automatic

2. It’s important to double check the technological infrastructure of the faculty before each exam. This is a big part of the success of this process.
3. Once Qorrect is implemented in your faculty, one of its team members will be available for 2 months at least there, part of the technical support Qorrect offers. This period may be extended as per request. So if you have any kind of question, you will have instant assistance.

Examination Time

5. Before the exam starts, each student enters his/her password in order for all screens to be open to the exam directly once the time starts. In case one of the students lost his password, for example, Qorrect team will be able to easily fix this.
6. If one of the students tries opening any, unauthorized, browser or program during exam, they will not be allowed; the screen will show the exam only. Moreover, most faculties using computerized exams maintain extra alternative computers in case of any sudden errors. In this case, lost time is to be taken into consideration by the observer and the student’s time will be extended for the time taken till another computer is up and running.

Second: Students

How Do I Prepare for Computerized Exam?

You don’t have to think much about the things you may have forgotten before any test, your pen, pencil, rubber, ruler, what else? In fact, computerized exams have come to save your time as well as professors’ time. Now you can save your efforts only for studying; there’s no longer any need for any of these tools when taking computerized exams. You may, however, need only 2 things:

1. A clear mind.
2. A strong memory.

Further, if you need to change your answer during the test, you will be to do just that before the time is over; editing is an all-time available option. However, do not let yourself to hesitation and counterfactual thinking, a concept explained by Roy F. Baumeister and Brad J. Bushman in their book “Social Psychology and Human Nature, Brief.” It is imagining alternatives to what already happened in the past or what is happening now.

This is something humans pass through sometimes. Both authors see that this manner of thinking greatly affects students during exams, especially during answering MCQs. A student, for example, may choose one of the answers and then starts doubting their first instinct and thinking that choosing another answer may be better.

The authors go on saying that some test preparation guides advise students to be cautious if they chose to change their answer: “Experience indicates that many students who change answers change to the wrong answer.” so our advice to you is to believe in yourself and be confident answering test questions; plus, do not let psychological theories and hesitation affect your answer if you are believe it is true.

If you study in one of the faculties that have chosen to start implementing computerized exams software, you are one of the lucky students! Faculties that have started implementing computer-based exams have made great efforts to provide high-quality specialized computer labs for tests, as what happened in Cairo University, Al Kasr Al Ainy, Al Demerdash, Ain Shams, and Benha University, the Faculty of Computer Science.

Through the computerized exams in universities system, Qorrect, you can know your result once the exam is over. Remember that implementing this system in Egypt happened in the first place in order to have balanced fair exams for all students and reduce the human error factor in grading tests, or eliminate it completely.

Modern technology may be only a tool; however, it’s a tool that we cannot do without in developing the testing system in Egyptian universities. Therefore, continuing to invest in edtech and evaluation and assessment software is the foundation of educational development in Egypt.

To know more about Qorrect, the comprehensive assessment system, please press here.

 

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