Digital is the way ahead and IIM Calcutta is setting the trend after conducting a full year of exams — three mid-term and three end-term exams — virtually. That's 45,000 question papers since June 2020. Mercer | Mettl, a global online examination, and remote proctoring platform is IIM-C's exam partner in leading their shift to the digital mode of education.
To ensure a smoother transition of its students, administrators, and educators to the virtual education environment, IIM-C conducted multiple dry-runs and platform walkthroughs in the weeks running up to the exams. The holistic walkthroughs helped students and faculty gain familiarity and comfort in the end-to-end exam-taking experience, customised in multiple formats and question types, such as quizzes, classroom assessments, mid-term and term-end semester exams.
So far, the B-school has conducted three mid-term and three end-term exams for its various programs and courses, including programs such as PGP, MBAEx, VLM, and PGDBA, in subjects ranging from Marketing to HR to Finance to Operations to Strategy to Entrepreneurship.
IIM-C aligned over 2000 proctors for its examination drives to support large-scale exam processes, ensuring efficient handling of scalability when offering thousands of tests simultaneously. Employing thousands of proctors and dry-runs enabled the B-school to offer cheating-proof exam processes, ease of use and a customised test-taking experience while maintaining the utmost sanctity of its education delivery standards. Professor Manish Thakur, Dean, New Initiatives and External Relations, IIM-C, said, “IIM-C is specifically concerned about maintaining the rigor and robustness of its assessment processes, and has taken extra care to maintain its high standards, even in the virtual model.”
“The pandemic has accelerated the shift to the digital means for disruption-free education. Over the last many months, we have been working diligently to ensure smoother examination processes by building robust platform capabilities that ensure a differentiated experience for students, administrators, and academia. Additionally, we want to make digital examinations as seamless and user-friendly as in the physical setting, with features such as state-of-the-art AI proctoring and anti-cheating enhancements” said Siddhartha Gupta, CEO, Mercer | Mettl. IIM Calcutta is not alone, IIM-B, ISB Hyderabad, Ashoka University, BITS Pilani, Amity University, and Bharati Vidyapeeth, aside from 500+ educational institutions worldwide are using Mercer | Mettl.
This shift also fulfils academia’s and other concerned stakeholders’ long-standing demand for digitising education by leveraging new-age technologies, such as AI and ML, to replicate step-by-step processes of traditional or classroom-based learning.
