Bengaluru: RGUHS to conduct paperless test for MDS

BENGALURU: Buoyed by the success of holding exams via digitabs for physiotherapy students, Rajiv Gandhi University of Health Sciences (RGUHS) is now introducing the same for MDS later this month.
The university aims to extend the paperless exams to all its 3.3 lakh students by this year-end. According to its plans, students will be provided with digitabs for writing the exams.The tabs will have internet connections for the first few minutes when students can download the question papers. Following this, the students can write the exam just like on paper, with facilities to erase, colour, and draw among others. The tabs will be stored by the colleges and used for further batches.
RGUHS has given the option for students to choose the digitabs or go by the conventional way of writing on paper. In the allied health science programmes, among 250 students who took the paper, four opted out. As per the university, the students expressed interest in digitabs after three exams, but the conversion was not possible then.
The students are being given mock exams and training on how to use the tabs before the exams are rolled out. MDS exams will also have 250 students. “The pilot for the exams has been found so successful that we thought we could extend it to other programmes also. By the end of the year, if all logistics fall in place, we could have all our programmes going paperless. Internal assessment will be done on these tabs soon,” said RGUHS VC MK Ramesh.
“The cost of procuring the digitabs will match with that of printing and providing answer scripts and question papers, thus making it financially viable. One advantage is that answer scripts that are uploaded on cloud become available for evaluation shortly after the exam. It also saves the colleges the effort of collecting the answer scripts and transporting them to the storage areas,” he added.