Can 5Wasara Change the way students study for exams?
The Grade 5 Scholarship exam is more or less the first challenge that school children will face. Unfortunately, it has become a gross competition where students pit against each other to score that last mark. Aiming to deliver a more laid back and relaxed approach is the goal of the educational app 5Wasara.
Image Credits: Counter Point
What exactly is 5Wasara?
At its core, 5Wasara is an educational app that gives users a list of question papers to help Grade 5 students. The goal here is for them to gain better results for their scholarship exam.
The app is developed by 16-year-old Bihan Mahadewa and the question papers have been constructed by a panel of teachers from schools such as Lumbini College, Prince of Wales Moratuwa, and Sri Parakumba College Rajagiriya. Each of their personal qualifications is also listed down on the 5Wasara website as well.
The first thing I noticed about the 5Wasara app was that the entire app was in Sinhala. The main interface of the app has 4 collections of question papers. Each collection comprises of another 10 Question papers. In turn, each question paper consists of 40 MCQ (multiple choice questions). That’s a total of 400 questions per collection.
With regards to the question papers, the moment you open one of the 10 questions papers in a collection, a countdown timer appears at the top of the app. Answering the questions is also rather simple. Since it’s an MCQ, you just have to press the correct answer. If the answer is correct, it will be highlighted in green. If the answer is incorrect, it will be highlighted in red.
The panel responsible for creating the questions in the 5Wasara app
When answering questions, you can pick an answer and then go ahead with the next question regardless if the answer is right or wrong. On the other hand, if you pick the wrong answer, you can try till you get it right and then move onto the next question. This obviously affects the overall duration of the question paper but also ensures you know what the correct answer is. At the end of the last question, the total number of correct answers is shown along with the overall percentage you scored.
In addition to the question papers, the 5Wasara app also has a section to post advertisements along with a student portal.
The portal contains additional educational resources for the Grade 5 scholarship exam.
These include questions related to road rules, plants and animals and also famous figures in history. Lastly, you can also set up your own profile for 5Wasara.
Is 5Wasara really a viable solution?
Well, that depends on the person using the app. If the user is someone who is looking to score the maximum they can in order to gain admission to a better school, then yes, the 5Wasara app will help. On the other hand, with the the Grade 5 Scholarship exam set to no longer be compulsory, students might not actually sit for the exam. This, in turn, means that apps like 5Wasara will become obsolete.
If you have any suggestions for the app, you can also leave a comment on the app’s page on the Google Play Store. You can also reach out via Facebook.
(The author is senior writer at ReadMe.lk)
That’s almost 400 questions to answer. Better get cracking then
The 5Wasara app highlights correct and incorrect answers but only marks the ones you got right the first time
In addition to just question papers, the 5Wasara app has a number of other sections as well