The government of the Punjab carries out annual assessment of almost 2.4 million students of grade 5 and grade 8 across the province. At this scale, efficient systems and processes are a fundamental requirement. Since 2014, the Punjab Examination Commission (PEC) has worked with PITB to implement an integrated IT enabled system for student registration, exam conduct and results processing. These examinations are carried out by the PEC. Traditionally, PEC used to employ a labor-intensive manual registration process with extensive back-office activities to register students and to process and disseminate results. To curb paper leakage and cheating, the exam generation software enables the PEC to create several versions of each exam automatically, based on selection parameters. In coming months, data related to assessment (including performance level comparisons at regional, district, and provincial level), would be made available to schools on their tablet- PCs. Education administrators including CEOs, DDEOs, and AEOs will also be provided timely access to school and regional level results and analysis via their smart phones.
Automation of the PEC examination processes has shown significant results:
- Improvement in speed and accuracy during student registration and marks entry
- The recently provisioned item-bank software enables PEC to build a secure database of questions – with each question tagged with different qualifiers including SLO, grade level, difficulty-level, taxonomy rating, item-ageing, and usage history
- Ability to create multiple versions of each exam paper – thus minimising the possibility of cheating
- Timely and transparent dissemination of results