Pupils at a Chesham school put down their pens and picked up their mice to be guinea pigs in a Government examination experiment recently.

Key Stage Three Pupils at Chesham Park Community College are among the first in the country to sit the trial SATs online which will form the basis of the compulsory computer tests introduced for all 13 to 14 year-olds in 2008.

The pilot project involves 500 secondary schools nationwide and is organised by the Government's Qualifications and Curriculum Authority (QCA).

It claims pupils have been making history as it is the first time a national online test has been sat by pupils anywhere in the world.

Seated by their terminals, the Year Nine pupils took two 50-minute tests, which were automatically marked by the computer and doubled checked at random by teachers.

The automation of the test results unnerved some pupils who said it was "a bit worrying like computers are taking over the world".

On the whole however Chesham's pupils rated the computer tests highly, giving them a "good" score and saying they were fun and easier to understand than the written tests usually set for them.

Some pupils said they felt they were less stressful, due to the familiarity of the computer labs compared to the spacious examination halls where tests are usually taken.

The children's ability is measured by their timed response to a series of practical commands such as creating a file or spell checking a Word document.

So far the four-month-long trial has attracted 36,000 "guinea pigs" nationwide for its online testing, three times the amount QCA had predicted. It is now looking for schools to take part in next years trials.