MITO introduced a digitized test scoring system for prefectural high schools in March 2023, which was introduced on January 24 by the Ibaraki Prefectural Board of Education.
The move comes after a series of errors in admissions in the prefecture between the 2020 and 2021 academic years. Multiple-choice questions will be automatically graded to improve efficiency, allowing more time to be spent on checking scoring results, including written exams.
Over the past two years, 988 scoring errors have been found to have occurred in prefectural school entrance exams. Four students who would otherwise have passed the tests failed because of the mishap.
The prefectural board of education increased the number of multiple choice questions and conducted multiple checks in the 2022 entrance exams to curb scoring errors. There were concerns that the increased proportion of multiple-choice questions made it hard to assess applicants' ability to express themselves. It was decided that written questions would be boosted from the academic 2023 exams onwards.
In conjunction with the shift, the prefectural education board purchased dedicated software for some 7.87 million yen about $60,320. With the software, answers to multiple-choice questions are converted into digital data using optical character recognition, allowing them to be automatically graded.
Under the new scheme, multiple teachers will use the auto grading system to cross-check their results and compare them to the original answers. The automation will give you time to grading written portions of the entrance exams, as well as overall checks.
The software was tested at all of its schools beginning in the fall of 2022 by the Ibaraki education board. On January 24th at Naka High School in the prefectural city of Naka, teachers tried the software using mock exams. Principal Kazuhiro Shoji said we'd like to create a system where applicants can take their tests without any worries. The upcoming entrance exams for Ibaraki prefectural high schools are scheduled for March 3 at 92 schools and one branch school. When the software was introduced in the entrance tests for prefectural junior high schools on January 7, no problems were reported.