ClassMarker: online pop quiz, feel free to cheat.

April 25th, 2007 at 12:00 am

Quizzes are the dread of every student but it's the most valuable tool for every teacher to measure a student's progress. Not surprisingly, there's already a site designed for teachers to administer quizzes online.

ClassMarker is an online quizzing site where teachers and students alike can easily give and take exams over the web where ever and whenever in the world. ClassMarker is actually more useful to the teacher since the results of the test or tests can be processed on the fly for each of the students.

There are however some setbacks to ClassMarker. First is the interface, it's simply a CMS that the teacher has control over. This UI is actually harder to use than I thought and the links aren't very clear especially when creating a class and giving a test. It requires a lot of getting used to. I could only suggest that they make it easier to use.

Secondly, no security measures. As we all know honesty is the best policy but as I remember in college, I was cheating on virtually every exam (and never got caught). There are no anti-cheating methods implemented by ClassMarker, although since it's all on the web, I guess there's no point to it.

Third, there is no email invites to students. Every student must be inputted manually by the teacher. The other way of inviting students is by giving them an invitation code that ClassMarker will not send to them (the students) but instead only to the teacher. This gives the teacher more work rather than ease.

All in all, ClassMarker is actually a nice idea and very useful especially for distance learning but it has greater potential in regular classrooms or HR departments if only there were ways to implement more security for the tests. For now, they could just start fixing up the UI, yes it's clean but it's not easy to use.