Question

Are online tests good or normal school tests?​

Answer 1

$\huge\bold\pink{ANSWER }$

Students are desperately cramming information into their heads, hoping to score high on their final exams. Coursework has its place in assessing a students' progress. But exams are definitely a more effective way of assessing students, due to the accuracy and fairness of the situation.

Answer 2

Answer:

Has the shift from paper to online testing led to lower scores on standardized tests? Researchers Ben Backes and James Cowan of the American Institutes for Research explored the question by examining two years of results (2015 and 2016) from the PARCC assessment in Massachusetts, where some districts delivered the tests online and others stuck with paper. We sat down with Backes to discuss his somewhat surprising findings.

This is an interesting study looking at the difference between taking tests online and on paper. Did you find the pen is actually mightier than the keyboard?

At least in the time period that we studied, there is pretty compelling evidence that for two students who screen-shot-2018-05-29-at-11-41-27-amare otherwise similar, if one took the test on paper and one took the test on a computer, then the student taking the test on paper would score higher. And that's controlling for everything we can control for, whether it's the school that a student is in, or their previous history, or demographic information. It looks like there is pretty meaningful differences in how well students score across test modes. We found mode effects of about 0.10 standard deviations in math and 0.25 standard deviations in English Language Arts. That amounts to up to 5.4 months of learning in math and 11 months of learning in ELA in a single year.

Could it be that higher-performing districts are choosing paper and the lower-performing are choosing computers?

What's interesting is that there is a difference in the prior achievement of the districts that chose paper versus online, but it's probably perhaps not what you wouldscreen-shot-2018-05-29-at-11-41-44-am expect. At least in Massachusetts, it was districts that switched to online testing that had the higher prior achievement. Back when everyone was taking tests on paper, these districts scored consistently higher year after year. Then once those districts switched to online testing, their achievement fell and it was closer to what the lower-performing districts were experiencing.