A Hindi-medium coaching institute needs four things from an online test platform: Devanagari that renders instead of turning into boxes, an instructions page in the language the student reads, bilingual papers because the exams your students sit are offered in Hindi as well as English, and a way to get previous-year papers onto the screen without retyping ninety questions. Three of those you set up yourself on MockSetu, free and with no card: the language choice, the instruction fields and the import route. The fourth, rendering, is not something to take any vendor's word for, MockSetu included - there is a check below that settles it on any platform you shortlist.
One distinction decides whether the rest of this is useful to you: nothing here translates your paper. You write the questions, options, passages and both sets of instructions in whichever language you want, and the student sees exactly that. The chrome around it - admin buttons, field labels while you build - is English, so whoever builds your papers needs to be comfortable reading English. Students never see that layer; if they did, you would be measuring English reading speed rather than general awareness.
The Devanagari Render Check, Before You Build Anything
Do this before you commit an evening to building a paper, on any platform you are evaluating, including this one. Devanagari conjuncts, matras and nukta characters break in more places than Latin text does, and they usually break silently, so this is a test you run rather than a question you ask a salesperson. Build one throwaway exam with three questions. These are the script-specific items only - the general buyer's checklist is in best online test maker for coaching institutes.
- Type a question with a heavy conjunct cluster and a long matra, save it, reload and look again. Text that renders on entry and breaks after a reload is a storage-encoding problem, not a font problem, and it will affect every question you write.
- Paste the same sentence out of a Hindi PDF instead of typing it. Hindi text layers are often mapped to a legacy font and arrive as recognisable-looking garbage - better learnt on question one than question sixty.
- Open it on a budget Android phone, not the laptop you built it on. Line-height and matra clipping show up on small screens first.
- Write a question mixing Hindi text with a number, a unit and a formula. Mixed-script lines are where spacing goes wrong.
- Check the option labels and the answer key screen, not just the question body. Some tools render questions properly and truncate options.
- Write both sets of instructions in Hindi and open the student instructions page. On MockSetu those are free-text fields you own, with a generator if you would rather start from a draft.
If a platform fails any of the first five, stop there. No analytics make up for a paper your students cannot read.
Bilingual Papers, Because the Real Paper Is Not English-Only
The exams your students are sitting are offered in Hindi as well as English, and your batch has to pick one. So the right default is a bilingual paper - you choose English, Hindi or both when you set the exam up, and each student then sits the version they will actually answer in rather than the one you happened to build. One limit to tell your batch about: the student picks a language on the instructions page and the attempt runs in that language start to finish. An aspirant who likes to cross-check a clumsy Hindi phrasing against the English line will not be able to rehearse that habit here. It is more work, because you write both versions and nothing fills the gap for you, which is correct: a mistranslated option on constitutional articles is worse than no Hindi. For the workflow, see how to create a bilingual Hindi-English online test.
What Is in Hindi and What Is Not, Said Plainly
Here is the honest split, because overselling it wastes your evening.
- In your language, because you wrote it: question text, options, passages, section names, the exam name and description, and both sets of instructions - including the instructions page, which carries your text and a paper table before the timer starts.
- In English, and not configurable: the creator-side builder you make the paper in, plus fixed furniture on the exam screen such as the palette and timer controls.
- In Hindi as an explainer: the creator pillar has a Hindi twin at the Hindi version of the creator page, useful for a partner or a sceptical senior teacher. This blog, though, is English only.
A student who spends four minutes decoding an English instructions page has lost four minutes of the paper, and your mock has measured the wrong thing.
Getting Hindi Previous-Year Papers In Without Retyping Them
This is where Hindi-medium institutes lose the most time, and it has a specific fix. The default import route is JSON: take MockSetu's extraction prompt from the JSON upload guide, run it in whatever AI tool you already use, save the JSON and upload that file. The paper arrives with its questions, options and answer key in place. Nothing is installed, and you are not tied to one vendor's AI.
Two things to know before you try it on a Hindi paper. The extraction is only as good as the text layer in your PDF, and scanned Hindi papers are the hardest case in the pipeline - check the output against the original before you publish, not after a batch has attempted it. And the importer leaves numeric-answer, TITA and match-the-column questions for manual entry.
Figures are not lost on the way in. The extraction records each figure's page and bounding box, and the upload asks for the source PDF and cuts them out for you to approve, one thumbnail at a time. For what is left - a Hindi passage in a font that garbles on copy, a figure the extraction missed - there is a better move than retyping: snip the question, an option or the whole passage out of the PDF as an image and attach it. The student then sees the original typesetting, matras intact, exactly as the commission printed it.
Two things you may read about elsewhere are off by default: the server-side Import from PDF button, and the field that labels a paper Previous Year rather than Mock. Both are switched on per account on request, so do not plan around either. Build your workflow on the JSON route and the snip tool, which need no grant.
Marks and Clocks That Match the Pattern You Are Teaching
A mock that does not carry the real marking scheme teaches the wrong attempt strategy. SSC MTS is the clearest example: 90 questions and 270 marks across two sessions of 45 minutes each, where Session I is qualifying only and carries no negative marking while Session II counts for merit and carries minus one. Practise both halves under a single uniform penalty and the student learns to be cautious where they should be aggressive. If your batch is on this exam, point them at the free SSC MTS previous-year papers first.
You set marks for a correct answer, a wrong answer and an unattempted question per question, which lets one paper hold a no-penalty section and a minus-one section at once. Multi-correct questions can award part marks or be all-or-nothing, the penalty can be charged once or per wrong option, and part marks round down, to nearest, up, or stay exact. Each section gets its own clock, sections can share a pooled clock, switching can be locked or open, and the paper auto-submits on timeout.
For any exam other than the one you teach every day, look the pattern up in the current official bulletin before you build. Patterns change between cycles, and a mock built from a half-remembered scheme is worse than no mock, because students trust the number it gives them. For a whole series, how to create an online test series covers sequencing across a batch.
Reaching a Student on a Budget Phone
If your batch sits papers on shared or low-end Android phones, on data plans that do not love app installs, the shape of the product helps. MockSetu is a responsive web app - no mobile app to install - and a published mock can be attempted by a guest with no account at all, from a shared link. You preview your own exam first and nothing from a preview is recorded. A signed-in student who drops mid-exam can return within about five minutes on the same device.
One constraint before you build a business model on it: a published paper is public. It goes into the public test library and anyone can attempt it. There is no private delivery to one batch, no paywall, no way to sell access. For free practice and public reputation that is the point; for a paid test series it is a dealbreaker, better known now than in month three.
Live Tests in a Classroom With One Projector
If your teaching happens in a room with a projector and a batch on their phones, live exam mode fits better than a take-home mock. Students join with one code after signing in once, and you run the paper from the front: projector view, options shown or hidden, the answer revealed on timeout. Standings can be public, creator-only or off and names can be hidden, which matters where a weak student would rather stop participating than be seen at the bottom; a private button lets one say they are lost without the room knowing. While the session is running you get, per question, the median answer time and a right-wrong split read against fast-slow. The report afterwards gives class accuracy, median score, participation, drop-off, the questions worth going over again, where people pressed the lost button, who took part, and a shareable link.
What This Will Not Do For You
Said plainly, so nobody finds out the night before a test.
- No proctoring at all - no webcam monitoring, no lockdown browser, no tab-switch detection. A home mock is an honesty-system mock.
- No payments, subscriptions or paid access. Published papers are public.
- No CSV or Excel export and no per-student report cards. Creator analytics are aggregated - section-wise accuracy, time per question, where the class struggled - with a top-three leaderboard by username above them and nothing per student below.
- No white-labelling, no custom domain, no branded app. The only place your institute's name appears is wherever you type it: the exam name and the description.
- No Excel or Word import. JSON is the import format. No question shuffling, and no cap on attempts.
- No certificates, and no email, SMS or WhatsApp notification about a test - you send the link yourself, usually in the batch group you already run. Account email for signup and password reset does work; the platform just never messages students about a paper.
- No generating questions from a syllabus. The AI extracts from a paper you supply; it does not invent questions.
A First-Fortnight Rollout
Do not digitise a decade of papers in week one. Prove the script, the clock and the finish rate on one paper first.
- Day one: run the Devanagari render check above on a throwaway exam. Fix nothing else until it passes.
- Day two: build one previous-year paper, Hindi only, using the JSON route for the clean questions and image snips for the ones that garble.
- Day three: set the marks and section clocks to match that exam's real scheme, then preview the paper end to end - a preview records nothing. If the platform warns you that your instructions no longer match the paper, fix the instructions rather than dismissing the warning.
- Day four: publish and send the link to one batch. Watch how many attempts arrive and how many reach the end, not the scores.
- Week two: read the aggregated section-wise accuracy and time-per-question numbers with your faculty against what you believed about that batch. If the answer key needs a correction, a published paper is locked for editing, so unpublish it, fix the key and publish again - and tell the batch, because attempts already graded keep the verdict they were given rather than being re-scored.
- Week two, second half: rebuild the paper as bilingual and offer it to a second batch. Be honest about what the numbers can tell you - a published paper is public and there is no batch to filter by, so you cannot tell which attempts came from which group. Treat completion as a hint and ask both batches which version they prefer.
- Then: duplicate the exam for the next batch rather than rebuilding it. The copy carries the questions, sections, languages, instructions and the marks setup, so open the scheme to check it rather than re-entering it. Once a few papers are getting finished, ask about a Verified Creator badge.
If you have never built an online paper, the walkthrough in the free test maker guide for teachers is the shortest path to your first, and the creator home for building and publishing exams is where you start an account. It is free, there is no card, and the only thing you cannot get back is the evening spent retyping a paper you could have snipped.