COVID-19 posed a gigantic educational crisis that has forced over 300 million students out of school and 37 million out of higher education institutes in India and worldwide over 1.6 billion students. One of the major problems, educators are facing in these testing times, is to conduct final examinations as there is huge uncertainties to how long COVID-19 lockdown and its after effects will persist.
Amid this deepening crisis, National Institute of Industrial Engineering (NITIE), a prestigious management institute in Mumbai and ranked among the top 10 B-schools of India teamed up with mUni Campus, a leading education technology company and successfully conducted final examination with live proctoring for students of Post Graduate Diploma in Industrial Engineering (PGDIE); Post Graduate Diploma in Industrial Management (PGDIM); Post Graduate Diploma in Industrial Safety and Environmental Management (PGDISEM); Post Graduate Diploma in Manufacturing Management (PGDMM) on May 4, 2020.
To conduct their online examination, NITIE opted for mUniParkisha - a tool for conduction of online examination like multiple choice questions, descriptive questions and answers based exam, assessment and viva exam. The online examination of NITIE commenced on 27th April and students were provided an opportunity to practice online demo test for over two days to get comfortable with this new way of giving exams online. The examination was conducted in a quite innovative way.
Students were able to appear for the exam comprising of a mix of MCQs, short & long descriptive questions. Students had a choice to write their answers in the text box provided for and/or write on paper and upload the scanned sheets before submitting their work for grading. This is the first such testing done in India. Prof Manoj Kumar Tiwari, Director, NITIE congratulated mUni and NITIE team and said, "Personally, I am very impressed by the details and every aspect of mUniParisksha features.
mUni team has excellent domain knowledge of education field and have understood all the challenges faced by an educator and institution in conducting examination. mUni has developed Pariksha which meets and in some areas exceeds the requirements of an institution in terms of traditional examinations.
Congratulation to the entire team of mUni for their efforts in making Pariksha available to us at such a short notice" Dr Hema Date, Professor& Dean (SA), Decision Sciences and Information systems at NITIE said that "NITIE has provided valuable inputs and suggestions which were quickly adopted by mUni team to make mUniPariksha the platform of choice for NITIE and perhaps in future for every educational institute. Students were given three choices to attempt the exam. First, write in the text editor on laptop; second, write the answers in a word document and upload it on the testing platform; third, Hybrid Mode (Online + Pen & Paper). Students were able to view questions on mobile or laptop and answer each question in the traditional way using the paper and pen.
Once the test was completed, the answer sheet was scanned using mUniPariksha mobile app and was uploaded. Dr Vivek Khanzode (Dean SRIC) did value addition by critically testing the platform, and Dr Padmanav Acharya (Dean Academic) validated the academic rigour. All the three deans commented "During such testing and uncertain times when the education sector is facing the brunt of Covid19 crisis, mUniPariksha has come as a boon to NITIE where the examinations are being conducted without any compromise on the examination pattern i.e. the examinations are all descriptive, pen & paper and online answers, just like the traditional examination were held" Bhupesh Daheria, Founder, mUni Campus said, "Our goal is to help the educators and institutions to manage this unprecedented crisis and provide unified digital infrastructure for seamless experience of imparting end to end education. We have developed a very innovative way of doing the examination at large. It is secure and highly scalable with live proctoring. We are providing mUniPariksha online examination solutions following the guidelines of UGC.
