IIM Calcutta partners with Mercer | Mettl to conduct its examinations online amidst the pandemic
Gurgaon: IIM Calcutta, one of India’s premier business management institutions, has recently achieved the distinction of successfully conducting 45,000 exams virtually across various programs since June 2020. Mercer | Mettl, a global online examination and remote proctoring platform, is IIM-C's exam partner in leading the latter’s shift to the digital mode of education. The transition to the online education ecosystem, amidst the prolonged pandemic-induced disruption, helped the B-School maintain academic and examination continuity. It also strengthened the institution's vision of adopting modern-age technology to enable world-class digitized education while adhering to its strictest code of conduct in education.
To ensure a smoother transition of its students, administrators, and educators to the virtual education environment, IIM-C conducted multiple dry-runs and platform walkthroughs in the weeks running up to the exams. The holistic walkthroughs helped students and faculty gain familiarity and comfort in the end-to-end exam-taking experience, customized in multiple formats and question types, such as quizzes, classroom assessments, mid-term and term-end semester exams.
So far, the B-school has conducted three mid-term and three end-term exams for its various programs and courses, including programs such as PGP, MBAEx, VLM, and PGDBA, in subjects ranging from Marketing to HR to Finance to Operations to Strategy to Entrepreneurship.
IIM Calcutta aligned over 2000 proctors for its examination drives to support large-scale exam processes, ensuring efficient handling of scalability when offering thousands of tests simultaneously. Employing thousands of proctors and dry-runs enabled the B-school to offer cheating-proof exam processes, ease of use and a customized test-taking experience while maintaining the utmost sanctity of its education delivery standards.
Speaking on the same, Professor Manish Thakur, Dean (New Initiatives & External Relations), IIM-Calcutta, said, “IIM-C is specifically concerned about maintaining the rigor and robustness of its assessment processes, and has taken extra care to maintain its high standards, even in the virtual mode.”
As part of the online solution, Mercer | Mettl has provided robust scalability, seamlessness and anti-cheating prowess to the entire gamut of IIM-C's conduct of examinations, evaluation of the students, and the declaration of results. All this while ensuring credible and secure exams through high-performance, AI-based remote proctoring technologies.
“The pandemic has accelerated the shift to the digital means for disruption-free education. Over the last many months, we have been working diligently to ensure smoother examination processes by building robust platform capabilities that ensure a differentiated experience for students, administrators, and academia. Additionally, we want to make digital examinations as seamless and user-friendly as in the physical setting, with features such as state-of-the-art AI proctoring and anti-cheating enhancements” said Siddhartha Gupta, CEO, Mercer | Mettl.
IIM Calcutta joins a host of other prestigious universities and colleges that have partnered with Mercer | Mettl to shift their examinations online for procedural continuity and to build robust education ecosystems. Some notable institutions that have joined hands with Mercer | Mettl include IIM-L, IIM-B, ISB Hyderabad, Ashoka University, BITS Pilani, Amity University and Bharati Vidyapeeth, aside from 500+ educational institutions worldwide. This shift also fulfills academia’s and other concerned stakeholders’ long-standing demand for digitizing education by leveraging new-age technologies, such as AI and ML, to replicate step-by-step processes of traditional or classroom-based learning.
