Why Students Check the Testing Platform Before Joining Any Institute? TCYonline Blog

Why Students Check the Testing Platform Before Joining Any Institute?

Choosing the right coaching center is the most critical step toward success in any competitive exam. One wrong choice leads to an unpardonable loss of time, effort, and a wasted entrance exam. One of the most crucial and foremost things a student should consider before joining a coaching center is its testing module. The quality of the testing module and its integration with the courseware differentiate an excellent coaching center from the rest of the crowd.

Every exam like IELTS, PTE, and TOEFL is different, with predefined standards and patterns. Test series for such exams should have high predictability, i.e., scores achieved by students in the test series should predict scores in the actual exam. If the tests provided by coaching centers are too easy, it keeps the student under false confidence, and if the tests are too difficult, students get disillusioned. So the tests must match actual exam standards.

Students should be wary of centers that offer easy tests and relaxed scoring to keep them under a false impression of improvement.
The two essential elements in a test series are:-

-Test Pattern: Type of questions, test interface, and the scoring method. All of these elements need to be perfectly aligned to the actual exam.
-Difficulty level: The test series difficulty level should be at par with the actual exam.

For example, listening exercises in most of the exams use native speakers with an international accent in English. Still, if the audio used in the test series provided by coaching centers is either heavily accented or in an Indian accent, then the difficulty wouldn't match with actual exam standards.

Similarly, errors and ambiguities in the test also skew the test's difficulty and reduce its ability to measure language skills. TCY's world-renowned test series matches the actual tests to perfection. The content passes through a 7 stage quality check on international standards to make it error-free and relevant. These make it a popular choice in 18 countries besides India.

For instance, Sunny Kumar scored an 80 overall in PTE and praised TCY, which he believes provided lots of relevant practice tests, and he faced similar questions in the actual exam.

Another aspect that is often undermined but is very important for the predictability of scores is the evaluation, scaling, and equating process. Maintaining the concordance of scores given by different human raters has always been an issue. Alike, PTE, TCY solves this problem by AI evaluation of writing and speaking tasks. If automation is not possible, then rubrics are used to reduce subjectivity.

Rule-based scoring algorithms masquerading as AI Raters are flooding the language assessment market. An accurate AI software behaves more like a human accepting different writing and speaking styles, different accents, correct alternative spellings, correct alternative date & time formats, etc., among many other things, just like the powerful AI rater used by TCY.

Converting students' raw scores into an exam-specific scaled score is a statistical process that considers the difficulty of the test, scores of other students, etc. TCY's Psychometricians and data science team has fine-tuned its scoring algorithms for many years, leading to a high level of accuracy and predictability.

Sri Raksha, who scored 110/120 in TOEFL, was thrilled to share that the reading and listening sections were very accurate as she got her final scores in a similar range as in TCY test modules. She even claims to have got identical questions in the actual exam.

TCY practice test results are integrated with what is taught in the class, which helps measure the effectiveness of classroom learning. Teachers get inputs about individual students' weak areas, and students get automated remedial test suggestions.

This arrangement allows students to progress faster as the analytics engine helps them focus on their improvement areas. The research team plays a vital role in creating content of international standards, and TCY's heritage of working with leading publishers worldwide has helped them maintain international-level quality standards.

Prince achieved an overall score of 85 in the PTE exam by regularly practicing each module and test series. Students like her searching for a coaching center can either look if the center uses TCY test preparation solutions and be rest assured, or check if all the above-discussed parameters are met by the tests used by the institutes they wish to join.