Hi Lauren

 

1.            We use City & Guilds for all Functional Skills – English, Maths and ICT

2.            We set our own windows for L1/2 and Entry level exams throughout the year for first sittings and re-sits so the exams can be sat at times/dates of our choosing and also be organised and scheduled in advance.

3.            We primarily run online for L1/2 and Entry level are paper-based.  For the occasional student who may need a paper-based L1/2 exam we run these on demand so they tie in with the windows that we set.  The S & L exams are run during class time and the teachers schedule the times/dates themselves and then report results back once marked/iv’d.

4.            Pass rates are far higher with online exams.  When we ran the pilot FS scheme around 4/5 years ago our achievement rates were appalling bit since the invention of the online world they have vastly improved and we are getting more students through 1^st sitting than with paper-based.

5.            PROS

Online is far easier to manager than paper-based.   For one thing we have 3 dedicated online testing rooms so we don’t have the issue of not having an exam room available as and when required plus when we ran paper-based exams at the start of FS we had to use the sports hall because of the large numbers involved who needed to sit and this of course upset our Sports Curriculum Dept as they couldn’t use the hall for practical teaching and wound everyone else up for recreational sports as the hall was out of bounds for 2-3 weeks in terms 1 and 2.  Now everyone “loves” us because we only use the Hall in the Summer months for A levels and GCSEs and any other paper-based (Cache, Counselling etc). 

 

Because there is a “window” of 30 days when the students can sit the online tests from the date it is scheduled i.e. 10 days before scheduled date and 20 days after, should any of them DARE to be absent we know we can slot them into another group’s session without having to re-book the exam.  Also the results come through a lot quicker for online than paper-based so should the need arise for someone to re-sit earlier than the scheduled re-sit session we can book them in quickly.  Also should a teacher forget to request a test for one of their students we can squeeze this in as a matter of urgency instead of having to wait and give C & G 3 weeks’ notice of paper-based requirements.  Of course we tell play the “well I’m not sure we’ll have to check with C&G about this, we’ll do our best” card as we don’t broadcast the fact that we can do last minute bookings otherwise they’d “forget” an awful lot more than they do already!!

 

The fact that if a test freezes mid-exam you can switch off and log into another PC and start up from where it froze is a good point.  The Pause and Resume buttons for Invigilators are also helpful when a student either feels ill and has to leave the room or needs the toilet or in the event of a disturbance, this means the students don’t lose any of their exam time.

 

The coloured font/backgrounds has benefitted those students who struggle with black on white screens.  One thing C & G are apparently working on is a way to enlarge the font rather than zooming with the mouse which will help our students with visual impairment.  We used to use ZoomText but a lot of students with minor impairments struggled with this as they just wanted the font enlarging to 14 or 16.

 

The Invigilation packs you can print off with the attendance register, individual keycode sheets etc help us keep track of attendance a lot more easily plus we just give the student their personal exam sheet, they log in and off they go.  Lot less paperwork that we have to create now seeing as it’s all there and done for us….anything to make life a little easier J

 

CONS                                                                   

When it goes wrong it can be a nightmare i.e. computer systems crashing.  In the first year of e-volve there were some serious issues as the platform didn’t seem to be able to cope with the volumes of bookings nationwide but this appeared to have been resolved over the last 12 months.  Fortunately in the last year we have only had a few issues with the e-volve system with Keycodes not working and once when our whole server went down.

 

 

Hope this helps

 

Regards

 

Kate

Kate Oliver
Examinations Manager
020 8326 2298

West Thames College
London Road
Isleworth
TW7 4HS

 

 

 

 

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