One fine morning I was enjoying
my cup of tea reading newspaper where interesting news grabbed my attention. It
read ‘Bangalore University is adapting to digitized evaluation of their
students’. I thought it is indeed a smart move to keep up with today’s fast
changing world. But if we give a keen thought to analyze the reasons behind
such changes in education, it reveals the necessity for the up gradation of
today’s education system for the better future.
Digitization has started way
back in 1960s. It has now spread all over the world making its mark on almost
every field. As we all know digitization has made everything simpler and easy
so it should be applied wherever possible to achieve high efficiency. Education
is one such field where digitization can prove to be boom. Students of today’s
era are less excited to learn from books. They are more tech savvy and digital
equipment appeals more to them. In this situation digitization can help to
teach students more effectively and thus increase the quality of education.
Digitization is developing
rapidly in India. Almost all the industries, banking sectors, hospitals are now
using digitization for the effective working. But educational fields are not
much in the digitization. We have some of the examinations who have adapted
digitized evaluation but these are either high level exams or very few
institutions have implemented them for their regular courses. On the contrary
all the western developed countries have made efficient use of digitization to
improve their educational quality. Our education system is more inclined to
traditional ways of teaching-learning. Even if traditional ways are not causing
any losses to students but surely student’s growth rate is affected by this. It
is much slower as compared to the modern ways.
Digitization has brought revolutionary changes in the field of
evaluation of students. You cannot get the accuracy it offers by any other
means. It is the most accurate way of evaluation. You can trust the results
with 100% assurance. It basically compares the answer given by the students to
the one fixed in the system. If it does not match it overtly marks it wrong.
There is no relative marking like partial correct or partially wrong. Obviously
this enhances the perfection in students. There is no scope to any unfairness
and it eliminates malpractice totally from evaluation of students. Plus these
evaluations provide results with every detail. Unlike conventional way where
only marks are given. In such situation students don’t know where they actually
stand in class, maximum marks attained and how much they need to improve. Here
marks are not the criteria for success but it is certainly a measure to
understand the knowledge of student. Conventional system does not satisfy all
such needs. Whereas a digitized results have in detail analysis of your
results. It tells your marks, your relative marks keeping highest marks as
standard, your relative position. It also give details regarding class result
such as percentage of students with distinction, first class and so on,
percentage of students failed, the areas in syllabus where most of the students
are weak and strong. Such detailed analysis is not possible in conventional
system.
Also only detailed analysis of result is not sufficient. We need
individual analysis of each and every student also. As said before knowing only
marks and their relative position does not give an insight into student’s
knowledge level. Many a time it happens that a student with low marks has got
concepts clear than student with higher marks. In this case individual
assessment provides necessary solutions. It tells where the student has done
most of his mistakes, which area he/she needs to work on etc. from such
information every student gets the chance to correct their mistakes and also
teachers can decide further scope of action for every student. We know that
there may be hundreds of students in a school and giving such detailed analysis
for everyone will be next to impossible for teachers. I have seen some report
cards of students with digitized results. It had very nicely represented
results in the form of graphs, pie-charts and block diagrams. There were many
sections like calculation ability; vocabulary, writing skills etc. and each
were represented in percentage. This gave clear idea about student’s weak areas
and strong areas. Students were amused to see such report cards and they
perfectly know where they need improvement. It made work easy for teachers
also. Teachers by just seeing the report card could tell what corrective
actions are needed. Another good thing
is you download this report card from anywhere and refer it whenever necessary.
I have even seen some software which evaluates student’s thought process while
solving paper. Now suppose one situation where student have written answer
rightly but the thought process behind it is wrong, then after result student
will remember that from that particular method I got correct answer and for
next time this method may not prove correct. And such analysis is not possible
from conventional system.
Here we should understand that conventional system of evaluation has
some shortcomings. If teachers are told to give such results, they will take a
lot of time. Also we can’t assure 100% perfect results from them as they are
also human beings; they can cause errors in evaluation. We might need extra
teachers to do the same job and this whole will cost a fortune to schools.
Digitization is cost effective way to improve evaluation of
students. Like Bangalore University more and more institutes, schools should
adapt it for the better future of their students.