TCS iON’s Digital Marking Hub Expands its Evaluator Ecosystem

TCS iON, a strategic unit of Tata Consultancy Services (TCS), a leading global IT services, consulting and business solutions organization, announced a partnership with The English and Foreign Languages University (EFLU) to train and certify its faculty and senior students on the TCS iON Digital Marking Hub platform. This further expands the large ecosystem of professional evaluators that TCS iON uses to offer location-independent marking services to customers across the globe using its Digital Marking Hub platform.

The TCS iON Digital Marking Hub is a first-of-its-kind platform that digitizes the subjective answer script evaluation process, leveraging digital technology along with the expertise of professional evaluators to make the process location-independent, scalable, faster and more efficient. The platform allows markers to perform video, audio, and paper-pen based answer book marking.

With a growing demand for English language literacy, institutions in non-English speaking countries have increased their focus on English language education. However, the absence of sufficient numbers of local evaluators proficient in English has proved a bottleneck in the timely and accurate assessment of students. By making the process location-independent, TCS iON enables the use of a global pool of expertise to help these institutions improve the scale and quality of their student evaluation process.

“Our Digital Marking Hub takes answer script evaluation into the digital era, helping educational institutions and exam bodies gain immense speed and efficiency, while freeing them from the administrative, operational and logistical hassles involved in the traditional manual process,” said Venguswamy Ramaswamy, Global Head, TCS iON. “Our partnership with EFLU will offer opportunities to certified evaluators in India to participate in marking students across the world in English and other foreign languages.”

Prof E Suresh Kumar, Vice Chancellor, EFLU, said, “This is one of the most significant partnerships that the University has entered into in the past two years. TCS iON’s training and certification in marking will empower EFLU’s teachers and senior students to expand their horizons and become part of a larger marking community, while also providing them the opportunity to connect with learners from different parts of the world.”

TCS iON offers location-independent marking services to a number of customers including Sapix Yozemi Group (Yoyogi Seminar), a cram school in Japan, for assessment of spoken English tests. TCS iON has also on-boarded qualified and certified teachers of English and other domain subjects in India, who have been meticulously trained to evaluate textual and spoken (audio) responses.