Online exams have several advantages over traditional, paper-based exams. The most obvious is that they are more convenient for students and teachers. Experts predict the online exam industry to witness rapid growth in the coming years. Online exams have several benefits, including convenience, accuracy, and flexibility. In this article, you will learn about these advantages and other associated benefits. 

Online Exams Offer More Flexibility

One of the significant benefits of online exams is flexibility. With an online exam, students can take the test anytime and from any location. Another benefit is that students can make as many attempts as needed to pass the test and earn their grades without worrying about travelling back to school or paying an additional fee.

Furthermore, there are no limits on how many questions you’re allowed to answer in an online test—or even how many times you can retake the same question. If you have trouble answering one question, you have plenty more opportunities available before your time runs out (or until your allotted number of attempts is used up).

The Exams Are More Secure

Online exams are more secure, as they cannot be photocopied or shared. In addition to the digital barcodes used to track each paper test, online exams also include a section that students must fill in by hand at the end.

This portion of an online test is called an anti-plagiarism question or “human verification.” It’s similar to what many websites already use: you must present your unique ID number before accessing content on them (like when you log into Facebook).

Make Use of Online Assessment Platforms

You can also use online assessment and exam platforms to administer an exam digitally. It uses advanced tools to help you organise your exams, including authoring, delivery, marking, results, and analysis. 

Invigilators have complete control over their test sessions, enabling them to start and pause the test, allow or reject entry to candidates, and force-submit a candidate’s examination. Students can benefit from tools like a notepad, calculator, ruler and protractor, timer, flagging, and progress summary. 

You Get Detailed Analytics Immediately

When you administer a paper exam, you must wait for a specific time to know how your students performed. You may get vague feedback like “students struggled with question 3” or “the questions were too hard.”

With an online exam, however, you get detailed analytics immediately after students take the test. You can see how each student performed on every exam section and for each question or answer choice—down to whether they made any typos.

Online Testing Is Cost Effective

Online testing is more cost-effective than paper exams because you don’t need to buy multiple copies of textbooks or handouts for the class. You also don’t need to spend money manually printing and grading the tests. Instead, you can use tools that allow students from anywhere worldwide to take their exams at a designated time without having any physical presence on campus.

Online exams prevent cheating

Online exams also help prevent cheating through an elaborate authentication process. For example, before logging in to take an online test, students must use a username and password combination they created before beginning the exam. 

The authentication process ensures that everyone who takes an exam has their unique login credentials, making it easier for administrators or moderators later on down the line when determining who did or didn’t cheat during testing time.

Online exams have several advantages over paper assessments and are being accepted in large numbers by schools, colleges, and universities. They significantly enhance the exam-taking experience, both for students and teachers. 

IAS Aspirants often regard IAS toppers as their role models and try to perceive the study materials, sources and the books for UPSC exam followed by IAS toppers. 

 It is crucial for aspirants to select the best books for UPSC exam preparation out of the surfeit of study material available both offline and online. 

Considering the need of the UPSC 2020 aspirants, we are providing the latest and most important books for UPSC that are referred by almost all IAS topper to make the preparation for IAS exam a smooth ride.

The best books for UPSC preparation can vary for different candidates depending on their knowledge and expertise in the subject matter. However, this article gives you a subject-wise list of the books for UPSC recommended by the toppers. 

Books for UPSC Recommended by IAS Toppers

IAS toppers recommend that candidates preparing for UPSC 2020 must start their preparation with NCERT books and then forge ahead to the standard reference books.

Given below are the important books to refer and come out with flying colors in UPSC 2020 exam:

To prepare for History, aspirants can refer to these Books: 

  • India’s Struggle for Independence – Bipan Chandra
  • Facets of Indian Culture – Spectrum &
  • NCERT XI – XII for Ancient, Medieval & Modern Indian History

Books for Geography:

  • World Atlas
  • Certificate Physical Geography – G C Leong
  • Old Syllabus from NCERT VI – X and New Syllabus of NCERT XI, XII

Books Indian Polity: Indian Polity can be best prepared by NCERT IX – XII and the book by M Laxmikanth

Book for Economics: Best books to refer for economics are Indian Economy by Ramesh Singh, Economic Development & Policies in India – Jain & Ohri and NCERT XI

For International Relations  UPSC preparations candidates should refer NCERT XII (Contemporary World Politics) and Current Affairs

For CSAT papers candidates should go through Tata McGraw Hill CSAT Manual, CSAT II by Arihant and R S Aggarwal for Verbal & Non-Verbal Reasoning. 

In order to be successful in the most coveted Civil Services exam,  it is imperative that aspirants have access to the best books, study material and latest syllabus to prepare for the UPSC exam.