Background

Whizz Kidzs Abacus Academy shifted their teaching and assessment activities in online mode, As the abacus is much different from conventional teaching and learning methods, it was challenging for them to streamline these activities in online mode.

Abacus examinations contain 100s of questions which are supposed to be solved in a span of a few minutes based on the level of difficulty. The difficulty level of questions increases and time span decreases as the student moves from basic to advanced levels.

The students enrolled in abacus institute were of varying age, students enrolled for foundation level courses were of age 4-6 years, while students enrolled for advanced level abacus were of age 7-14 years of age,

Considering these challenges, it was necessary for Whizz Kidzs Abacus academy to opt for such a technological solution which would help them to tackle the challenges efficiently. The institute approached Eklavvya to accomplish this demanding situation

With Eklavvya, the Whizz Kidzs Abacus Academy could efficiently conduct 65000+ assessments for 2000+ students located across the country. 

Here is how Eklavvya helped the institute to conduct such a large number of exams-

As the abacus is different from other learning formats, exam format needed to be redesigned to comply with the novel requirements of it. Technology has always been transforming to meet the niche needs of such exam formats

Here are certain features of online assessment engine that can efficiently handle abacus exams

Ability to handle large numbers of exams

There were large number of students appearing for the exam, The abacus exams are held monthly, quarterly or annually at a time for large number of students, It was crucial need that the platform must handle large number of concurrent exams. The platform should be scalable, meaning that the platform should scale its capacity as the number of students appearing for the exam increases. With the online exam system, it is possible to accept the exam applications till a day before the actual examination.

User friendly exam interface

The students appearing for exam were of varying age, right from 8 years to 16 years, it was necessary to keep the user interface easy to understand for even small age students. The abacus exams were time bound and of short duration so the students could not afford losing time in understanding the interface. Students could easily appear for the exam without any difficulty in understanding the interface due to the intuitive UI.

Here is a picture of abacus exam user interface

Effective time management

The abacus helps students to do calculations at a faster pace, thus for students, it is important to manage the time efficiently.Students have to solve 100s of questions within a few minutes .This made time a critical factor for conducting abacus examinations. There was a need for such a platform which had facilities to keep track of student activity over time. 

The exams were of 10 minute duration, students had to answer 100s of questions in such a short time span, keeping in mind such a short duration of exam, it was a must for management to opt for a stable exam platform so that students won’t lose any time because of technical glitches.

Question format support

The abacus exam contained mathematical questions, students had to solve the questions and type the answer in the given text box, the students could also upload the scanned copy of written answers, which helped them to explain mathematics steps and easily include mathematical symbols as per the requirement of the question

Malpractice free examination

As the exams were being conducted remotely, there were chances that students may seek help from other students or friends, the reliability of results was totally dependent on the examination procedure and the management wanted the exam to be malpractice free. 

The institute opted for Image proctoring, the images of students were captured time to time via web camera, administrator could define the time interval at which images were to be captured, these images could be stored on secure cloud and be accessed anytime, in case any suspicious activity from student side, these images can serve as a recorded proof of malpractice whenever required.

Result generation

The abacus institute required the result in a predefined format which included details like subject wise and topic wise marks of the student, earlier, this process used to require a lot of human resources and time for sorting the results and converting it into a printable format, using the online exam platform, the management could directly download the results in required format as a printable file without any manual intervention

The management team of abacus institute found the examination system very stable and user friendly, they could streamline the exam management activities easily, the candidate data management, exam assignment and result processing required minimal manual intervention and thus saved a lot of time as compared to earlier approach

Here is what the administration team of Whizz kidzs Abacus Academy says about us

We are in an educational field where we teach maths to children. After the pandemic, we had to change our ways and means of teaching… Which was quite challenging !! We took that challenge and could successfully transform our modes of teaching into online mode. WE, at Whizz Kidzs, hold a competition every year.

Competition is very prestigious and thousands of kids participate in it with lots of enthusiasm. Conducting that competition was not like an ordinary examination. A time of as little as just 10 minutes is given to students. This was quite challenging because the online examination papers which you can set on your own, do not allow you to keep a timer of 10 mins. This is where Eklavvya helped us !!

We took around 65,000+ exams and the team was always very supportive! Thank you for exceptional software, I hope the bond grows stronger in the future!

Preeti Lohar
Whizz Kidzs Abcus Academy