Innovations in digital testing The availability of digital tools is increasingly taken for granted. You can also see this in education and training situations. Many teaching materials are offered digitally, several schools, companies or private exam institutions work with laptops and/or tablets. This argues in favour of offering tests digitally as much as possible as well. Currently, the assessment of open questions still almost always take place by human assessors. Closed-ended questions, on the other hand, are reviewed automatically. Human assessment has a greater margin of error than automatic assessment. Indeed, different kinds of biases can play a role in human assessment. In the future, however, it is not inconceivable that Artificial Intelligence (AI) could be used to automatically assess open-ended questions. Below, we elaborate on three other innovations within digital testing: Skills test Online proctoring Fraud prevention Skills test Looking at digital applications in skills education and assessment, relevant developments have taken off in recent years. Think, for example, of serious gaming and virtual reality. Serious gaming is a form of teaching and testing that goes beyond playing a game for fun. The learning effect of using serious gaming has already been demonstrated through research. You can learn more from serious gaming than from e-learning (source: itpedia.co.uk). Virtual reality in education is also relevant, especially when it comes to the perception of students and candidates. Because virtual reality makes you feel part of the situation, it is easier to learn but also to give the right answers. Especially training more complex skills through serious gaming is taking off. Predictive testing in business is also finding applications in serious gaming and virtual reality. Consider, for example, testing for air traffic controllers. Predictive testing with serious gaming tests the suitability of candidates for the position of air traffic controller. Another example is predictive and summative assessment of candidates' managerial insight through virtual reality. Testing through serious gaming and virtual reality usually ensures high face validity. The relevance to professional practice of these forms of testing, as experienced by candidates, is high. Online proctoring One of the modes of take-up that is developing rapidly and represents a significant increase in flexibility for candidates is online invigilation. This allows remote viewing on the candidate's screen. Broadly speaking, this works as follows. The candidate records his surroundings and identifies himself, using a webcam and a mobile phone. The candidate's screen can also be monitored. The proctor thus checks the candidate's environment for the presence of any irregularities or resources. There is a variant where the proctor has direct contact with the candidate and a variant where the proctor checks for irregularities afterwards. The latter variant gives more freedom in terms of the timing of examinations, but it is not possible to intervene during the examination, for example if a camera is not positioned correctly. In both cases, it is important to take measures to protect personal data in advance and to ask candidates for permission to use online proctoring. This is particularly important when collecting, recording and storing visual material. Fraud prevention Finally, advanced methods for exam fraud prevention under development to detect unexpected response patterns and time spent per question. Based on data analysis, possible fraud can then be detected. This could be the case, for instance, when a candidate does not need any thinking time when answering difficult questions and scores well, and takes a relatively long time to think about easy questions. This technique is still under development and its findings cannot be taken as 100% ‘true’. Therefore, this technique is not yet applied in isolation from other findings, such as concrete observations on the test location. For example, if a candidate behaves suspiciously, the second step is to look for indications in the data analysis. Developments in digital testing Digital testing is evolving in many areas. The above developments give a rough picture of this. Do you know which innovation can take your testing and examining to the next level? At Optimum Assessment, we can help you optimise your digital testing.
