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Assessment and Exam Delivery

Genix brings assessments and exam delivery into the digital age providing a seamless experience.
Genix brings assessments and exam delivery into the digital age providing a seamless experience for candidates, examiners, invigilators, markers, reviewers and administrators. The Exam Management solution manages the lifecycle of assessments and exams.

Registration

Candidates are able to register, pay any fees and enrol for one or more tests online. Once enrolled they simply have to log in to schedule preferred dates and times (if this is an option), monitor schedules and updates, receive private or global communications, see the status of marking process and the tests they have completed and their final results. This private portal also provides access to direct Q&A, help desk and email communications.

The candidate’s profile data is uploaded into the system and aligned to each assessment and results.

Item & Paper Creation, Review & Management

The solution can interface with existing item banks or can be used directly to create, review and manage items. Papers can be automatically compiled and version control provides additional flexibility to the review process.

Extensive question banks with multiple choice, written answers, image analysis (e-Film Reading) and case scenarios are supported. Questions can be developed collaboratively and like the training and CPD modules, can leverage highly graphical, dynamic images.

Business rules and meta-data guide the selection of each set of questions with multiple variants on the extraction criteria including ratio, question type or category.

Schedule Optimisation

Genix has integrated the Opturion Event Planner and Timetabling optimisation capabilities to provide unprecedented control of exam logistics. Allocation of people to locations, tasks and shifts to match the number and expertise of the people available can be managed. Users can enter constraints such as the examination date, work balance, breaks, days off, staff preferences and other needs. Once optimised a calendar is generated that can be viewed by the team and global or private alerts can be set.

Exam Delivery

Exams can be delivered at the same time, in a highly secure hosted environment across multiple locations around the world. Multi-layer authentication protocols prevent unauthorised access and together with captive browsers (to restrict access to other applications and some keyboard functions) prevent cheating. Invigilators have full control over candidate exam sessions including pause, termination and time restrictions at the question level.

The system can automatically score and check to ensure that no question remains unmarked. This is complemented by adaptable marking workflows that can be tailored as required.

Automated Marking

The inbuilt online marking capabilities significantly increase marker performance by supporting verification, issues resolution, escalation and validation. Results are available for immediate review and human intervention can be prompted and monitored from within the system.

The solution includes text-mining algorithms designed by Genix’s partner Conscious Machines that allow structured and unstructured data to be quickly mined in one pass. This provides examiners with the opportunity to automate essay and long-form answers prior to results being reviewed by human markers. Detailed analysis of the results can also be undertaken with Genix’s advanced analytics features.

A full audit trail is provided for legal defensibility.

Results Delivery

Final results can be delivered straight to the student as soon as they become available through the online portal. No need to add postal services to the scheduling constraints.

Candidate Registration

Candidates can register to participate in forthcoming examinations through an online web portal that provides terms, conditions, privacy statements and candidate information and captures profile details, fee payments and schedule preferences. These details are automatically stored in the system and aligned to individual assessments, papers, markers and the candidate’s results.

The module also integrates with identity management systems for bulk provisioning of users, student details and single sign-on through external systems. Once registered, unique identities and passwords can be managed from this module.

Scheduling and Timetabling

The Opturion Event Planning & Timetabling (EPT) system has been integrated with the PROTRACK Examination Management module. For human event managers, the modification of a schedule to meet new requirements and constraints (due for example to unexpected attendees or extra activities) can become a nightmare. The EPT easily handles new requirements and constraints, quickly finding the schedule that minimises disruption to the event. Moreover, the Opturion solution is interactive, enabling permitted users to change features of the schedule and run the scheduler again so as to obtain a feasible schedule that satisfies the user’s revised requirements.

Assessment Delivery

The Examination module is designed for use in secure, high-stakes, low-stakes and on-demand linear assessments. The module contains functionality to support Test Administration including the creation of assessment events and test groups and the allocation of resources such as rooms and invigilators.

In 2013, Genix delivered a world-first eFilm Reading examination for the RANZCR, enabling candidates to answer questions in an environment that reflects workplace technologies.

Exams can be delivered at the same time, in a highly secure hosted environment across multiple locations around the world. Multi-layer authentication protocols prevent unauthorised access and together with captive browsers (to restrict access to other applications and some keyboard functions) prevent cheating. Invigilators have full control over candidate exam sessions including pause, termination and time restrictions at the question level.

The system can automatically score and check to ensure that no question remains unmarked. This is complemented by adaptable marking workflows that can be tailored as required.

Automated Marking

There is a facility to automatically mark MCQs, extended MCQs and short answer questions (the latter using text mining algorithms). Essay type questions are routed to markers who access and mark the candidate responses online utilising user-friendly marking keys that are presented to the marker in the online environment.

The Marking and Scoring engine module also supports a combination of machine marking (for MCQs and other item types that lend themselves to automated marking) and human marking based on user-friendly marking plans (keys) created at the start of the marking lifecycle.

Administrators set up the marking templates and assign markers and reviewers for each examination. The limits on how many papers a marker can mark in a given timeframe are established up front and this, along with the other business rules, determines the allocation of papers among markers using the optimised scheduling platform. Use of the schedule optimisation capabilities enables the identification of appropriate pairs of markers.

The markers will select the appropriate marking keys and this will record the marks for the candidate answer. The responses can be sent to the markers either as a complete paper for a certain number of candidates or as the same question across a larger number of candidates.

Double Marking

The Administrator can set marking threshold levels by question or globally for the allowable differential between the two markers and determine the treatment of the differential if it is less than the threshold value (i.e. if the average, the higher or lower of the two marks is allocated). If the differential exceeds the threshold value, then the Administrator needs to establish the rule that determines if the two markers are given the responsibility of agreeing a mark or if the marks are sent to a third party for review. These rules are configurable as are the rules relating to additional rounds of double marking.