Ontario's standardized tests will transition from pencil-and-paper to online over the next several years, starting with Grade 10 students in the 2015-16 school year.

“The current 2014-15 school year will be a year of consultation, research, analyses, field tests and trials runs,” the Education Quality and Accountability Office, or EQAO, said in an announcement Wednesday morning.

“If all goes as planned, the first students to have an opportunity to write the OSSLT (Grade 10 literacy test) online will be those scheduled to write it in the 2015-16 school year.”

The EQAO calls the move “one component of ... efforts to modernize the provincial assessment program” and says it will “make the assessments more engaging for students by allowing them to demonstrate their knowledge and skills in a number of different ways.”

Online testing will also allow for more detailed analysis of test results and help schools more easily administer the tests, which in younger grades run over several days each spring, the testing body says.

EQAO tests cover reading, writing and math in Grades 3 and 6, math in Grade 9 and reading and writing in Grade 10. Teens must pass the Grade 10 test in order to graduate from high school.

The tests cost the province more than $30 million a year and have been derided by teacher unions, in particular, who say they are time consuming and expensive; they have recommended a random sampling of students instead of the widespread testing of so many kids.

The tests are widely referred to by educators and kids as “evil questions attacking Ontario.”

The EQAO has also dealt with several cases of test tampering, including a recent case in the London District Catholic board where Tillsonburg principal Ronald Curridor lost his teaching licence for six months after a disciplinary panel found he had given the tests to teachers ahead of time, altered kids' responses and provided help to them during testing.

The EQAO said in a release that computer testing will “improve the consistency of assessment administration across Ontario schools while increasing assessment security and, in certain cases, providing the results more quickly.”

The move will also “reduce the environmental impact of Ontario's provincial assessment program.”

Paper versions of the tests will be available during the switch to online testing.

Bruce Rodrigues, EQAO's chair who is also the former director of education at the Toronto Catholic board, said “it's important that we bring the provincial assessments in line with the digital world we live in and the digital classroom that is an increasing part of education.”

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However, it is unclear how schools without sufficient numbers of computers would be able to administer the online testing.

EQAO says it will look at “questions related to equity, availability of technology at schools, assessment security, assessment validity, reliability and comparability” as it goes fully digital.