Online Exams Text

Online Exams: Practical Considerations

Many professors are wary of or puzzled by quizzes or exams delivered online. Obviously, the situation is different from in-class exams and quizzes. In traditional classroom exams, students are supposedly prevented from consulting notes, books, or other sources of information, or from collaborating with each other. In the online sphere, there are currently few efficient or effective ways to prevent that from happening. What is the point of providing exams online, professors may ask, if students are free to get help from the course material at hand, their fellow classmates, or the entire internet?

But there are several factors to consider before deciding whether an online exam is possible in your course.

For one, cheating in classroom assessments is notorious, and often difficult to fully prevent. Exam proctors can threaten, but never entirely eliminate determined and frankly resourceful academic dishonesty.

Moreover, Learning management systems have features in place that, like tactics used by faculty in big-enrollment, auditorium classes, can complicate the efforts of students who’d rather get easy answers, instead of learning experiences. LMSes can impose time limits on the exam-taker, akin to the class period for in-class exams. LMSes can deliver quizzes and exams that draw from question banks, at random. So each student may face different questions delivered in a different order, with only a few questions per page. For improperly-prepared students who wish to illicitly collaborate, hurriedly trying to figure out who has what questions, and what are the correct answers, all while the clock is counting down, can be a nightmare. And after all,, a pair of cheaters might manage to answer a few questions right, and still get an “F” on their respective exams.

Social circumstances may work against dishonesty, too. In certain fields or programs, and in smaller courses for higher-level and graduate students, a student might find it challenging to recruit others. In an online course, where students may not have known each other prior to the course, building a conspiratorial team to cheat might be even tougher. After all, if one student usually works on the course content in the morning, he might find it difficult to recruit other students who can only log on to do coursework in the evening. The very advantage of online education, it’s asynchronous flexibility, might make coordinating a conspiracy to cheat a real chore in itself.

But beyond the practical obstacles to cheating online, Instructors might look upon online coursework as an opportunity to evaluate how they are testing students, generally. Online exams might ask students to perform different kinds of work, or answer questions where timely use of sources or collaboration is of some, but limited help. Essay questions, problem sets that require judgements as to which procedure or variation of a process to employ, and even well-crafted multiple choice questions can be beneficially challenging to learners online. Key to this is setting expectations suitable for the exercise: an essay argument must be thorough, logical, consistent, and concise. A technical solution must be what engineers call “elegant:” an efficient and effective use of the concepts introduced in the course. The question or questions must be completed within 30 minutes, an hour, or an hour and a half. Access to books, the internet, or friends may be of little help to the unprepared exam taker, when she or he must make an argument or solve a problem within a short period of time, by using what they could really only learn through weeks of diligent participation in the course.

This kind of online assessment not only lets instructors know how well students have learned, but also teaches students practical skills for their future career. As knowledge workers, they will likely face demands to employ their knowledge, skills, and abilities to create timely, even impromptu reports, arguments, and solutions. While we now may have access to unprecedented amounts of information on our mobile devices, it is of little use if we cannot choose, filter, and employ ideas, concepts and procedures efficiently.

Whether or not you can use online exams in your class is up to you. It may depend on the material you teach, the circumstances of the course, and the kinds of students you have.. But consider carefully how you might do so. With some creativity, you might find a way to make exams practically more flexible for you and your students, while making them more effective at assessing student’s higher-order abilities.

Dropbox Exams

Another kind of exam we might consider porting online is the “take-home test.” Obviously, dropboxes make this easy to assign and collect.

For example, An upper-level undergraduate history course might feature an exam consisting of five essay options, two of which are randomly delivered to each student via dropboxes.

Students may have to complete these lengthy essays in a limited time frame, such as 48 hours. This gives time for students to consider materials that they have read, watched, or discussed in the class over a period of weeks. But if they haven’t been participating in the course and reviewing for the upcoming exam, it’s unlikely that 48 hours is enough time for them to prepare an adequate response. As with other forms of online exams, question design and random delivery of questions could make it somewhat impractical for dishonest, unprepared students to solicit innappropriate help from their more diligent peers.

This kind of activity could have variations across disciplines. It could ask students to develop a detailed, logical position or argument concerning an issue. It could be a problem solving exercise where students must choose and employ technical procedures or mathematical concepts in a series of steps. Students could have to work through a complex simulation of a real-world professional or policymaking process.

So with dropboxes, what would be called a take-home exam in traditional, classroom pedagogy could be ported online. While not facing an exam limited to an hour or two, students would instead have a day or two to complete a project or projects that require higher-order analysis and synthesis skills.