- The primary motivation for the development and implementation of online assessments in a large course was the elimination of the high costs of grading assignments and exams in a large class.
- The main advantage is that it can be conducted for remote candidates and evaluation of answers can be fully automated for MCQ questions and other essay type questions can be evaluated through automated system.
- Reduces long term costs.
- Comparatively required very less physical space - millions of answer sheets stored on a data disk at server which required less physical space than paper answer sheets.
- Another easily overlooked benefit of online exams is the enjoyment and satisfaction that students receive by using the internet to look up course materials and learn course material.
- The major benefit of online testing is the "paperless" aspect of computer assignments and assessments. Placing course materials online results in significant cost savings: paper, copying, and distribution expenses are all reduced or eliminated.
- Questions can be distributed just before or during the assessment, preventing opportunities for candidates to have advance warning of the exam content or being able to share the exam papers. Often the exam content is encrypted and is removed from the candidate's computer after the exam.
- Tests to groups of candidates can be randomised in terms of question and answer option order.
- Balanced or calibrated tests can be completely different for every candidate if a large item bank (or question bank) is used and the test structure is calculated using psychometric data.
- When objective items such as multiple-choice are used, computer-based tests can provide the advantage of auto marking/scoring, reducing post-exam overheads.
- The test can adapt to the candidate's abilities, presenting them with different questions based on the candidate's response to previous questions
- Frequent online assessment may result in (1) improved learning environment (2) a greater degree of student satisfaction, and (3) a higher level of student learning.