What computer-based testing changed, and what it didn't

The move to computer-based testing was reported as a technology story. For a candidate sitting the exam, almost none of the interesting consequences are technological.

What genuinely changed

• You cannot flip through the whole paper at a glance, so you cannot triage questions the way you could on paper.
• You cannot annotate the question. Working goes on rough paper, and transferring an answer is now a separate step where marks get lost.
• The clock is on screen and does not stop, which affects candidates who used to pace themselves by how much paper was left.

What did not change

The syllabus. The question styles. The fact that past papers are the most accurate practice material in existence. Every one of those was true in 1998 and is true now.

The practical lesson

Practise in the format you will sit. Not because the interface is difficult, but because the small mechanical differences — navigating between questions, deciding when to flag one and move on, keeping rough work organised — are skills, and they are cheap to acquire in advance and expensive to acquire on the day.

That is the entire reason AeroLearn's practice mode looks like a CBT screen rather than a quiz app. It is not decoration. It is the part of exam preparation that paper past questions cannot give you.

For schools

The gap we see most often is not hardware, it is exposure. A student who has used a mouse to answer forty timed multiple-choice questions ten times behaves very differently from one doing it for the first time in a hall. Any school with a single functioning computer lab can close most of that gap in a term.