Product Review of Socrative

An app for engagement and assessment on the fly, Socrative works on computers, laptops, tablets, and phones. With the ability to design activities, quizzes, and ask a quick question for instant feedback, educators can use this app in any course to help formatively assess their learners’ understanding. Students see a clean interface that easily allows them to respond to educator questions or work together to solve activities. Teachers see a visual representation of learner understanding as learner results populate their screen in real time. There are also options to view learner understanding at the class, individual learner, or question level. All educator reports are downloadable for easy grading and can also be transferred to Google Drive.
Website: https://www.socrative.com/
What Users Love About the App
“Socrative is a great tool for in-class low-stakes formative assessment. It allows for the students to gauge their understanding and the instructor to gauge how the class is doing over all.”
“I like to use mine for quizzes or tests. I have also used it for gaming such as Space Race. The program is nice for me to go back and see a record of student progress. I really like the ability to create a teacher pace quiz/test.”
“I use this for a pretest and posttest format before and after I have taught a specific unit. Students get to see the results instantly and I can control the pace of the test.”
“I improve time management by taking attendance and a review (check-for-understanding) of the previous discussion at the beginning of each class. I can make any assessment and assign them to several classes, as well as, with my fellow teachers as common assessments.”
“I have built up a quiz-bank for the next school year. I love the Latex feature for writing equations in Chemistry and Physics. I also like the ability to add an image or diagram for each question or a series of questions. I like the display for students taking the test of the Socrative App more than the web-based layout.”
What Users Dislike About the App
“On the administrative side, the only problem I have is that the scores cannot be bulk downloaded. You have to download each quiz separately.”
“Socrative should “refresh” with the name of students and their “Progress” as default with “Show Answers” and “Score” off. We don’t want to embarrass students, who get the wrong answers, but I always need to refresh my screen to see who is not yet on the test.”
“Students only see final grade. They can’t see individual question results on socrative.com unless I email the results to them. If they could see their individual question results when I end the quiz that would be awesome.”
“I experimented with the paid version to limit the number of times that a student can take an assessment. It is a little bulky. I mean there has to be a separate code for each class. I wish there was a way to use my one room, and assess everyone once without having to create student profiles.”
“In many occasions, students write correct answers in open questions, but the platform does not accept the answers. While monitoring the activity, there’s no chance to make any change, so one has to wait until the test is finished.”