The Hindu Business Line : Sify facilitates online exams

Mr Dipan Bhattacharyya, senior Vice-President (Enterprise Solutions), Sify said online examination could become the order of the day in the not too distant future.

Mr Bhattacharyya said Sify had started the service of conducting examinations online two years ago. "We have conducted about four-lakh online examinations for the Indian Institute of Banking and Finance (IIBF) from Sify iWays," he told Business Line.

Stating that companies increasingly preferred the online examination model both - in promotion and recruitment - as it helped them save significantly on cost of recruitment and administration, he said the model offered flexibility and the convenience of remote management, eliminating logistical issues. "It is unique and the evaluation and conduct - transparent," he said.

Sify has hosted 12 large servers to facilitate this service.

`We have conducted as many as 24,000 examinations on a single day, in different shifts, across various locations. The candidate, apart from taking the exam, also gets his score within minutes of completing his paper. No manual intervention is involved and there is no room for tampering with scores or impropriety in the evaluation process," he said.

After evaluating the convenience and success of this model, the Institute of Banking Personnel Selection (IBPS) adopted it for the entry-level banking test. The online examination idea has gained acceptance and IBPS, according to Mr Bhattacharyya, has indicated confidence in offering this on a larger scale in future. Only recently, 867 officers of Indian Overseas Bank took the Scale I to Scale II promotion examination through IBPS. The examination was conducted simultaneously at 123 Sify iWays across 47 cities.

"We have pioneered this initiative by providing value to our clients not only in terms of speed, reliability and accuracy of the application, but also by the tremendous reach potential made possible by the 3300-plus iWays across the country. Combining our technological expertise with the Sify iWay service excellence, we make the online examination process simple, both for the candidates as also for the companies availing of the service," he said.

Sify was also contemplating to have dedicated examination centres, he said and added that the idea generated a lot of enthusiasm among iWay owners.