David Azoulay chose the ExperQuiz solution in 2020, when the ESRA group - the "School for Film, Sound and Animation Film Professions" - had to integrate Parcoursup, the online system for orienting French high school graduates towards the various courses offered in higher education.

Seduced by the online assessment tool used in the competitive entrance exams for two of the five campuses - ESRA is present in Paris, Nice, Rennes, Brussels and New York - the group's CEO has since extended the use of the ExperQuiz solution to other areas, now making its third-year students take their final exams remotely via the platform.

Why did you use an LMS platform?

The ESRA group joined the online orientation platform Parcoursup at the beginning of 2020, thereby raising a new constraint: the need to industrialize our admission process in order to integrate this web application designed to collect and manage the wishes of future students in French higher education.

Initially, we used to run competitive exams common to all our schools from February to September. We used to bring the candidates on site for oral interviews and to carry out multiple-choice questionnaire tests that we used to correct by hand until now. From now on, students wishing to join ESRA Paris or ESRA Nice must apply via Parcoursup which obliges us to pass the exams for these two schools in only four weeks. This time frame is too short to correct the exams manually, knowing that we have many candidates every year. This is why we decided to automate the process by opting for the online assessment tool ExperQuiz at the end of 2019.

First in the context of our entrance exams, and more recently in the context of our schooling itself. Confinement has indeed forced us to meet a new challenge: how can we get our third-year students to take their final exams remotely? After discovering all the features of ExperQuiz, we decided to go one step further by also using the platform to administer final tests to our students.

Why did the ExperQuiz platform appeal to you more than any other?

What we liked is that the platform is very intuitive and easy to use, especially with regard to the MCQs, which was our main concern at the time. It was, therefore, very easy to train our teams on the tool and we were quickly able to take advantage of all the functionalities. For example, we set up an SMS reminder system which had never been done before at ESRA.

The other very positive point is that ExperQuiz adapts to a mass audience, which immediately reassured us since we have several thousand candidates every year.

Concretely, how do you use our tool?

For our entrance exams, we have three bases of questionnaires for each of our streams - Cinema/Television, Sound and Animation - with several hundred questions inside. When they take the MCQ test, candidates are thus subjected to a questionnaire of sixty questions drawn randomly.

For the exams, we have chosen to use another feature: free-response. In all, we have developed about forty different tests for several hundred students. Each student takes four or five of them depending on the options they chose. The principle of the evaluation questionnaire is simple: to answer a question, the student must enter a written answer in a free field and/or add an attachment.

How did ExperQuiz meet your expectations?

“The creation and configuration of the evaluation questionnaires is quick and easy and the team is also very attentive to our requirements".

For example, we had to make the evaluation questionnaires anonymous because we deliver a diploma approved by the government. We therefore need the graders to be able to correct the papers without knowing who the student is. ExperQuiz took our request into account and was able to respond to this need by creating a new feature that makes the tests anonymous.

Why would you recommend ExperQuiz?

What I really appreciate - and what is rare enough these days to be emphasized - is that the ExperQuiz team is both contactable, available and reactive, especially when there are small changes to be made at the last minute. For example, we were confronted with new technical constraints this week when setting up our exams, and the team immediately knew how to organize itself accordingly to accompany us - a technical support that makes the platform even more pleasant to use.