JOIN USMobile apps to help entrance exam preps
Sidhaant Gupta, who recently appeared for his Class 12 Boards is supposed to appear for engineering exams shortly. His performance in the same will decide his future. Yet when his parents come back home and find him busy with his smartphone, he isn’t taken to task!
A peep into Gupta’s mobile screen and one realises that he is accessing a mobile application Toppr.com to practise through a test and check where he stands in his preparation. “I will be taking the entrance exams for JEE (Joint Entrance Examination), VIT University and BITS (Birla Institute of Technology and Science) Pilani. Though I took tuition for core subjects, I opted to prepare through mobile applications,” says Gupta, an alumnus of Modern School, Vasant Vihar.
The idea sounds akin to what an advertisement by a cellular company projects – encourage the idea of pursuing education online. On the face of it, the advert sounds non-serious, but defines the true picture of youngsters who are usually glued to their gadgets!
Gupta says he downloaded the application of Meritnation.com and found the interface a bit complicated, so started browsing for more apps in his smartphone apps store. “Few mobile applications provide detailed answers while others don’t even ask those questions in test that were in practice material.”
Gaining awareness about the same, Rajiv Dhawan, father of two, downloaded a mobile apps to ease the practise for his young ones. “It all started when I took my daughter, who has recently passed her Class 12 , to a coaching institute for medical test preparation. Here, I got to know about mobile apps facilitating entrance exam preparation and downloaded the same considering my son too wants to opt for engineering,” Dhawan, himself a graduate in mechanical engineering and an MBA, tells Metrolife.
“When I was preparing for my engineering, I never thought even in my wildest dreams that my children would be studying for their engineering or medical through mobile!”His statement adds to the fact that there is a fundamental shift taking place with the help of technology. While laptops and tablets are already known to provide students with options to study online, the introduction of mobile apps in this arena will facilitate youngsters in small towns with good coaching options, as well as increase the competition.
Toppr.com launched its mobile apps recently keeping in mind the constraints that students face when preparing for crucial entrance exams. “We provide preparation material for Classes 8 - 12. At present there are 1.5 lakh users which are increasing at the rate of 40,000 every month,” says Zishan Hayath, co-founder of the website. Considering that there is a requirement for such a platform in the market, other players in the industry are on their toes too.
“In India, more than one crore students appear for entrance tests after plus two. Though all of them, especially the ones in tier-2 and tier-3 towns, do not have laptops or PCs, they do have smartphones,” says Piyush Agrawal, founder of Superprofs.com, which is working on its mobile apps. He elaborates that the apps being designed aims to bring India’s best professors at the students’ doorstep.
“Since internet connection in small towns is not very good, the download in the apps is seamless and can be accessed at any point of time,” he adds.As you read this article, Dr Sridhar, founder of Ace Creative Learning gears to launch a mobile apps too. “It is cumbersome for students to sit in front of a computer.
Our mobile apps will thus make it convenient for them to access information across all platforms. But our goal is to engage children for atleast two hours in a day. For the same, we are trying to make teachers available to answer queries online from 7 pm to 10 pm. When the same teacher goes back to the class the next day, he or she will have a report of how many questions were solved by a particular student and who requires extra attention!”
All this comes at a fairly low price when compared to regular coaching institutes which demand, “anything between Rs 50, 000 - Rs 2,00,000 for a year,” informs Hayath whose website charges Rs 3,900 for the same.
Probably, only three out of 10 students in cities are opting for these apps and parents in the same segment feel that these are not of much help without physical training. But what about when the same apps introduce video lectures? Is the private education system looking forward to this change?