Saarbrücken (GER)/Graz (A), January 2015 - Since November 2013, candidates for Austrian citizenship have been required to pass a revised written test in individual the Federal States. Since the start of this year, the Carinthian Academy of Administration has played a pioneering role in this process and is now implementing these tests electronically for the first time. To do this, it has relied on a tried-and-tested learning management system, the IMC Learning Suite, which offers numerous benefits for both the test takers and the testers.
With the introduction of the innovative learning management system, the Carinthian Academy of Administration can point to, amongst other things, substantially greater efficiency in terms of the work and cost associated with the citizenship tests. Optimisation of the entire testing and administration process results in significant time saving on preparation, implementation, and evaluation of the test.
Further plus points of the IMC Learning Suite are the clearly arranged archiving of the test results and the option to anonymise all the data collected.
"After successful training by IMC, the respective tests can now be created by our employees themselves. This means we save substantially in terms of time and costs", according to the Project Manager for the Carinthian State’s EDP system, Ing. Mastnak. Thanks to the ingenious integrated evaluation tool, both test participants and testers can benefit equally from the evaluation and statistical preparation of the test results.
The most important benefits of the electronic test process for candidates for the citizenship test are probably that they receive instant and error-free results, as well as a certificate immediately upon successful completion of the test. The user-friendly login process and the clearly structured setup of the test questions have also made an important contribution to the acceptance and success of the new system.
The content of the tests, which, in addition to questions regarding the basic democratic order and the history of Austria, also contains questions regarding the respective Federal State, are laid down by law and can best be depicted with a learning management system. Using a random generator, six questions are fairly and impartially extracted from each of the three defined pools of questions. This ensures that the test procedure provides eighteen randomised questions for each participant in the citizenship test.
The decision to implement the citizenship test and the data recording electronically has allowed the Carinthian Academy of Administration to enter the digital age. "Through the use of the Learning Suite, the stability and security of the implementation of the various tests was substantially increased", according to Ing. Mastnak.
The success of the project speaks for itself. Looking ahead, the Federal State of Carinthia would like to use the IMC Learning Suite to provide tests in other areas as well. The professional qualification for coach and truck drivers is being considered as a candidate for use on the learning suite. Because of the system's flexibility and ability to adapt, it is easy to comply with the heterogeneous requirements of the different target groups. The design of the test environment in this example was easily adapted to the corporate identity of the Carinthian Academy of Administration.
