Monday, October 17, 2011

Electronic Examinations - A Simple Primer

Electronic examination, in a nutshell, refers to exams taken using software. That software at a minimum should allow instructors to create and edit exams, present those exams, record students’ answers, and then grade the exam. In this blog I’ll present the general workflow of creating, administrating, and grading exams. This flow will need to be tweaked for your specific needs.

The (very) basic workflow has the following steps:

electronic examinations workflow image

The faculty member(s) create the exam – this can be done as an individual but some systems provide collaboration. The questions are then added from a question bank or created from scratch. Scores are set for each question and a passing grade is set for the exam. The exam can then be scheduled to run at from certain time and date. The scheduling can be done either by faculty members or by support staff.

The exam is then delivered to the students, either through a web browser or other client. Some solutions provide a security application that will lock down a pc or mac, depending on the vendor, preventing network access, hardware access such as the USB port or the hard drive, and even disable right-clicking on the mouse or screen-grabbing. This behavior can be quite invasive however, in my experience this may activate anti-virus software which recognizes it as an attack. In the case of windows at least, windows groups may be a better option for securing the computer.

For the traditional exam environment students come to a computer lab to sit their exam, they can also do open book exams over the web.

Grading is automatic, most solutions give the option of providing a grade immediately or at a later date. Immediately means that students’ final scores, and whether they are passing grades, are presented on screen once the exam is completed.

It should be noted that when running an electronic exam in the tradition environment it is the recommended practice that you always have a backup plan. ICT equipment can suffer failures and being able to roll-back to “Plan B” is generally better than cancelling an exam outright (more on this in a later post).

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