The first major milestones in anyone’s education are their Ordinary Level (O/L) and Advanced Level (A/L) Examinations. Seeking to join strong universities and land good jobs in the future, students work tirelessly to achieve excellent grades. ExamHub is a local startup that has recognised a crucial part of this success lies in practising learnings with past papers. Utilising technology, ExamHub aims to simplify accessing these past papers and help students learn without spending countless hours inside tuition classes.
Towards realising this vision, ExamHub was one of the 20 startups that joined the latest Spiralation cohort. In case you’re lost, Spiralation is an initiative by the ICTA to support local tech startups. The programme offers startups like ExamHub access to seed funding, market access opportunities, mentorship from experienced business leaders, and comprehensive business and technical training programmes. Spiralation is currently accepting applications for its latest cohort. If you’re running a tech startup, then you can click here to apply.
Examhub – Enhancing the learning experience with digital
As any Sri Lankan student knows, practising exam questions with past papers is tiring, from hunting past papers to figuring out the answers to getting them checked. All of it is an exhaustive ordeal that can stress even the most academic students. It doesn’t help that sometimes the marking scheme is either unavailable or vague. ExamHub seeks to change this through a series of apps to help students prepare for exams and create a better learning experience in the process.
Born amid the COVID-19 pandemic, the team has gone onto develop three apps to help students. These apps are aimed at different groups of students – Grades 6 to 10, O/L students, and A/L students. Behind these apps is a vast database of 2,500 multiple-choice questions from past papers published between 2014 – 2019. Currently, ExamHub’s apps have 1000+ students utilising them for learning. Prioritising the learning experience for its students, the company is investing heavily in its user experience.
However, it’s not been smooth sailing. Like any startup born during the COVID-19 pandemic, the Founder of ExamHub, Dilanka Sanjaya, admits it has overcome stiff challenges in going to market. Exams were consistently postponed during the initial lockdowns. Students, in turn, lost much interest in preparing for these exams. To address this challenge, ExamHub introduced a competitive learning experience on the platform. Students can now compete against each other on the platform to answer questions and claim prizes as they climb the leaderboard. Dilanka shared, “With the addition of this feature, we saw the students were increasingly more passionate about doing past papers.”
At present, ExamHub is only available on the Google Play Store. The team’s next big step is to bring it to iOS and the launch of its web app. While taking the apps to new platforms, newer versions will see the inclusion of multiple-choice questions from international examinations such as Edexcel and Cambridge. It would be a move that helps expand ExamHub’s user base to the growing population of students opting to follow international primary and secondary education. The startup is also looking to enhance its apps by introducing support for theory-based questions.
Ultimately, through its efforts, ExamHub is a promising EdTech startup that’s helping improve learning for Sri Lankan students. With support from the Spiralation programme, the startup has received a stepping stone to make its vision a reality. It’s another notable example of how the programme assists entrepreneurs in building innovative products that will benefit society. With the pandemic forcing us to stay indoors and learn online, ExamHub certainly shows excellent benefit in helping education continue today and improve the experience when students return to classrooms.