All of us teaching courses this year have had to wrestle with the challenge of online assessment. The traditional in-person, closed-book exam does not work well online since it is impossible to tightly control the exam environment.
In many cases, the best solution is to avoid this type of exam altogether by having a 24-hour take home, open-book exam where the environment does not need to be controlled, or online oral exams to name a few. As I’m sure anyone with the Centre for Teaching and Learning can attest, there are numerous other alternative assessment methods available to try out. However, for large introductory courses, particularly in quantitative subjects like physics, the large numbers of students and the need to use simpler questions that have a single right answer make such formats impractical.
In these courses the use of online, closed-book exams with remote proctoring to secure them may be the best practical solution at this time, and that means using Smart Exam Monitor (SEM) and/or Exam Lock, which are built into eClass. During the fall term I was a course convener working with two exceptionally dedicated and experienced colleagues all tasked with running online exams in eClass using SEM for a course with around a thousand first-year students.
Here are five ways that we found to help make SEM-proctored exams run smoothly, reducing stress for both us and our students alike!
1. Make Exam Rules Clear
Online exams are not just new to us, they are new to students too so we need to ensure that the exam rules are extremely clear to everyone. While the SEM page for students lays out some of the basic rules, you will need to add some context on enforcement. For example, reassure students that their dog suddenly barking in the middle of the exam is not a problem.
It also helps to make it clear to students that anything flagged by SEM will be viewed and checked by a human before any action is taken. Those of us who have used SEM know well that the overwhelming majority of flags are utterly spurious and can be immediately cleared. We had our TAs check the flags, clear the trivial ones and alert us to the small handful that remained - most of which were easily explained by the individual students when we contacted them to confirm what had happened.
2. Provide SEM Practice Sessions
Provide your students with access to practice SEM sessions so that they can test their hardware with SEM before the first exam. Since SEM will only let a student have one attempt per session you will need to create multiple practice sessions so that students who run into problems can try again to test a solution to their issue; you both need to know that their issue is confirmed to be fixed. Having students test SEM well in advance of any exam means that there should be plenty of time to contact eClass support to get help fixing the problem.
3. Allow Automatic Extra Time
Online exams require a lot of technology to function flawlessly for an hour or more. As we all know this does not always happen and there will inevitably be some students whose machines think the middle of the exam is the perfect time to reboot to install an update or whose network connection suddenly fails. Rather than dealing with all these problems individually, a simple solution is to allow any student who needs it double time for exams. This reduces student stress and automatically provides adaptations for students who encounter minor glitches often and might mean fewer emails for you as the instructor; it’s a win for all involved!
If you have students who require academic accommodations as supported by Accessibility Resources, be sure to double check out their website or get in touch with them directly for more information.
4. Consult with Colleagues and Listen to Students
Whenever possible, work with your colleagues to develop or simply talk through your exam plans; they may be able to spot any potential points for confusion or misunderstanding that you might have missed. They may even have new ideas to consider trying out. You can also contact the Centre for Teaching and Learning for a consult too.
Almost none of us have any experience of online exams when we ourselves were undergraduates to draw on, so try to give students a means to raise ideas and suggestions with you too. It can be daunting for students to provide input like this but making it very clear that you would welcome such feedback can help overcome this. Allowing them to share their input through anonymous communication channels can help with this too - but make sure they know that you really are open to hearing their ideas.
5. Have a Hidden Backup Exam Session
In the stress of an exam situation some students accidentally click SEM’s “Finish Exam” button at the start of the exam after completing the setup. When this happens SEM will not let them back in to take the exam. To fix this, create a separate SEM block in your eClass course, set it to “Available but not shown” and put a copy of your SEM exam session in this hidden block. Hiding the SEM block prevents students from seeing two exam sessions and then being confused as to which one to use.
When an extremely panicked student contacts you at the start of the exam to let you know that they accidentally clicked the “finish exam” button just send them the link to this hidden block. The sense of utter relief in the email you’ll get from your student confirming that it now works makes the extra setup worthwhile!
Working together, all members of our university community can feel comfortable and confident going into the final exam season.
You can find more troubleshooting and general tips on SEM and Examlock by visiting IST’s website. And don’t forget that the Centre for Teaching and Learning is always a great resource if you’re looking for a consult or if you have any questions about preparing your course assessments.
About Roger
Roger Moore is a particle physicist in the Department of Physics where he is a Professor and the Associate Chair (Undergraduate). He has worked at CERN on the ATLAS Experiment that discovered the Higgs Boson in 2012. He currently studies extremely high energy neutrinos in the ice deep beneath the South Pole with the IceCube Neutrino Observatory and is a founding member of the new P-ONE collaboration that plans to build a neutrino detector on the floor of the Pacific Ocean off the coast of Vancouver Island.