Why the Same Test on Paper or Digitally Leads to Different Scores

If you give the exact same test to two comparable classes of students, once digitally and once on paper, it's likely you'll see measurably different results. This has nothing to do with what the students know. It's a property of the medium itself. This phenomenon is called the Mode effect. The mode effect is the systematic difference in scores caused purely by how a test is delivered - paper, screen, or spoken - rather than by what the student knows. A research-backed difference This difference has been measured in a large body of research over the last four decades. The easiest way to quantify the exact difference, is by looking at international standardised testing, like the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), which looks at various academic skills of 15-year-old students across around 90 countries. In 2015, the PISA test moved from paper-based assessment to online assessment. Before making that switch, the OECD ran a field trial in which pupils in the same…