Edtech startup Testbook preparing millions for top govt, pvt jobs

New Delhi : With school and college education being offered remotely amid the pandemic in India, the next challenge is to prepare students for the government and private sector jobs from the confines of their homes, and edtech startup Testbook has built an e-learning platform which is now joined by more than 1.8 crore students to explore top-level openings.

Over 80 per cent of Testbook traffic is coming from the cities and towns beyond the top 10 metros and Uttar Pradesh, Bihar and Rajasthan are the top three states, followed by Madhya Pradesh and Andhra Pradesh, according to Ashutosh Kumar, Co-founder, and CEO, Testbook.

"Going forward, online education is going to be an integral part of the entire education system. In some places, it will be offered as a standalone online solution and in some places, it will be blended with offline," Kumar told IANS.

"We have entered into multiple new categories like Union Public Service Commission (UPSC), state PSC, engineering exams and Live Skills Training. These categories are showing good initial growth and will contribute big in achieving 3 times growth in next 12 months," he added.

Nearly 70 lakh users got themselves registered on the platform during the pandemic alone, when Testbook initiated curriculum-driven, cohort-based live tutoring courses which is showing 50 per cent (on-month) growth.

Students get live tutoring-based courses, exam-based mock tests and data-driven recommendations at every stage of preparation for more than 350 exams and dozens of skills on the Testbook app.

"Real-time advance level performance analytics is provided to users which has been a unique and most loving features of the app. Testbook analyses students' performance on 24 different data parameters and provide them real time personal and comparative performance analytics which help them know their exam readiness and their weak and strong topics," Kumar explained.

Founded in 2014 by IIT Bombay alumni -- Kumar, Narendra Agrawal, Manoj Munna, and Praveen Agrawal -- the company aims to become a leader in the $5 billion examination-preparation industry in India.

"At Testbook, we see a 53 per cent improvement in students' scores who have practised questions for 100 hours and 42 per cent (within 5 months) who have enrolled for Live courses. Data science and Machine Learning play a very important role here," Kumar noted.

Testbook currently have over 1.8 crore registered users, more than 18 lakh paid users and has helped over 50,000 students get job placements.

Testbook, in collaboration with book publisher S. Chand, has launched Smart Book, which is a physical book but comes with interesting features which provide online experience in a physical book.

"Smart Books are a question bank of the best 4000 questions selected from lakhs of questions through data science and machine learning technology which ensure exam preparation in an efficient way," Kumar told IANS.

Time To Answer (TTA) is provided with each question for the students to have a real sense of time and improve on time management during the exam. The time to answer a question is calculated after processing data of lakhs of students' performance on that particular question.

Various comparative performance analytics are provided in the Smart Book like what percentage of students skipped a particular question or what percentage of users answered a particular question correctly.

"We created an in-house book negation technology which creates books of 700-800 pages in just a few seconds with a single click. Testbook will leverage this to scale at a much higher speed with clear competitive advantage on price," Kumar informed.