Tests and exams don’t stop at the school or college level. One has to go through multiple rounds of filtration to step into the corporate ladder and a couple of the rounds would include written tests. Even when pursuing a career, it isn’t uncommon for businesses to evaluate the skills of employees by way of administering tests.
Now, with the recent online education revolution with the likes of Skillshare, Udemy etc. tutors need a way to give their students test and evaluate their learning. I could go on explaining the needs to have a flexible online platform that eclipses the cumbersome pen and paper method of evaluation.
Exam Professor is one such web app that allows you to build, embed, and manage your own exams, tests or quizzes quickly and easily. Time to test it out!
Pricing
Exam Professor plans starts from an inexpensive $12 a month to all the way upto $99 per month. Three numbers differentiate one plan from the other – the number of exams you can create, the number of students allowed to take part and the total number of teacher accounts you are allowed to create.
Pricing
Sure, there seems to be a plan that fits the budget of everyone in search for an app like this, but there is one more interesting component to the pricing plans. If you are charging people to take exams, Exam Professor takes a cut and based on the subscription plan you have opted for, this could range between 15 and 30% of your revenues. That’s an interesting business model for this particular domain they are operating in.
Benchmarking
I have come across a couple of web apps like this earlier, but it isn’t until now that the demand for an online test taking platform is so massive. Not counting the hundreds of thousands of traditional educational institutions and businesses, there are thousands of private tutors waiting on their wings to make a name for themselves.
Ideally, for an app like Exam Professor there shouldn’t any bottlenecks and annoyances while setting up an account or when creating tests. And the students or anyone else who take those tests shouldn’t find it any more difficult than taking a traditional exam. Those would be the key benchmarks we would be evaluating the app.
Getting Started
Exam Professor is built on top of Adobe Flash. To say that I was disappointed is a gross understatement. Why build on top of a platform that’s gone the way of dinosaurs? The upside though is that there is no visible lag or sluggishness when using the app. However, it’s annoying to see the page loading bar every step of the way.
Empty at Launch
At launch, Exam Professor looks less cheerful, thanks to the uninspiring spreadsheet like layout. The fact that there is an actual start menu doesn’t help things, either. But, that’s from where we begin to create classes, exams, students and more.
It’s Tabs Everywhere
To create an exam, you’ll have to go through a series of tabs. Again, a major setback from a user experience standpoint. There are just way too many tabs to go through, even though Exam Professor covers a ton of features between them.
Exam Types and Options
You can create a bunch of exams in one go and keep them all archived for future use. All you have to do is mark an exam as public for making it accessible by Students. Exams can be created in the standard question answer formats we are all used to. Extensive timing options give you enough room to control how you want to score when a student runs of out time.
Enrolment
Use the Start menu to create students. This screen is much better than the previous ones I encountered. Interestingly, the app doesn’t allow you to create usernames that are unique to your account and it checks against the entire database. This is a sensible decision keeping in mind that a student can use the same username across all courses he/she has enrolled to in the Exam Professor platform.
Creating Students
When you decide to enroll students for exams, just drag and drop them into the enrollment roster after picking the exam from the drop down menu. It’s way simpler to add and remove students this way. Once that’s done, dispatch emails with exam details and access information to all the students in the list.
Final Thoughts
From professors setting up their final exam to small businesses training employees, Exam Professor makes a valiant effort to deliver its best. The option to charge users to take exams is a fabulous idea that allows experts to make money by offering test packages and mock tests. While taking a cut of the revenue is not a strange concept, it could be for the education industry.
Going with Flash is a controversial idea, but I’m sure the user experience letdowns cannot be blamed on it alone. I have seen better designed interfaces with a smooth workflows built using Flash. The developers have built a feature rich app no doubt, but it’s hard time they turned their attention to revamp the front end, starting with the tabs.