The Department of Technology in Education (DTiE) has been awarded with the national ICT educational award during National ICT Achievements Awards organised by the Computer Society of Malta.

The award was received for the Automated Testing System (SSr) which was developed by the Secondary Support Staff. The system was developed to supplement the written ICT exam. The system is purely an educational tool implemented in all State Secondary Schools. It facilitated the process of assessing students individually in ICT skills while completing a practical task using the existing intranet infrastructure.

SSr automatically presents questions to the candidates who answer them hands-on using the computer. The SSr tracks the students’ response and corrects the answers, collects the results and collates them.

SSr is student centred, teacher friendly, standardises the assessment, by-passes the manual method of collecting, recording the transcription of results and provides immediate feedback to students. Results are also collected centrally and analysed. The modular approach design of SSr makes this system sustainable, transferable and can be changed from summative to formative assessment.