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The availability of digital tools is increasingly taken for granted. You also see this in training and education situations. Many teaching materials are offered digitally, several schools, companies or private exam institutions work with laptops and/or tablets. This argues for offering tests digitally as much as possible as well.
Currently, assessment of open-ended questions is still almost always done by human assessors. Closed questions, on the other hand, are checked automatically. Human judgment has a greater margin of error than automatic judgment. Indeed, different types of biases can play a role in human judgment. In the future, however, it is not inconceivable that Artificial Intelligence (AI) could be used to automatically assess open-ended questions.
Below we look at three other innovations within digital testing:
Looking at digital applications in the field of skills education and assessment, relevant developments have taken off in recent years. Consider serious gaming and virtual reality, for example.
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 makes it easier to learn but also to give the right answers.
In particular, training more complex skills through serious gaming is taking off. Predictive testing in business also finds application 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. In addition, one can think of predictive and summative testing of candidates’ managerial acumen through virtual reality. Testing through serious gaming and virtual reality generally provides high face validity. The relevance to professional practice of these test forms, as perceived by candidates, is high.
One method of procuring that is rapidly evolving and represents a significant increase in flexibility for candidates is online proctoring. This allows remote viewing on the candidate’s screen. Broadly speaking, this works as follows. The candidate records their surroundings and identifies themselves, using a webcam and a cell phone. They can also watch along on the candidate’s screen. 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 freedoms in terms of when to take the exam, but there is then no way to intervene during the taking, 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 ask candidates for permission to use online proctoring. This is particularly important when collecting, recording and storing imagery.
Finally, advanced methods of exam fraud prevention are under development to detect unexpected answer patterns and time spent per question. Based on data analysis, possible fraud can then be detected. This may be the case, for example, when a candidate does not need any thinking time when answering difficult questions and scores well, and takes a relatively long thinking time when answering easy questions. This technique is still under development, and the findings from it cannot be assumed to be 100 percent “true. Therefore, this technique is not yet applied independently of other findings, such as actual observations at the test site. For example, if a candidate behaves suspiciously, the second step is to look for indications in the data analysis.
Digital testing is evolving in many areas. The above developments provide a rough picture of this. Do you know what innovation can take your testing and examination to the next level? At Optimum Assessment, we can help you optimize your digital assessment.
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