This is part of a collection of Tip Sheets created in response to the COVID-19 pandemic and other emergency campus closures, however these recommendations are still best practices for online exams in general.
Guidelines when pivoting from an in-person exam to an online exam
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Determine if a final exam is still necessary in your course. CTE Teaching Tip: Making the Transition to Take Home Exams or alternative assignments may be feasible options if additional assessments are needed.
- Try to test only key course learning outcomes. Review the CTE Teaching Tip: Essential Requirements to review your CTE Teaching Tip: Intended Learning Outcomes and decide which elements are core.
- Encourage academic integrity (e.g., distribute multiple versions of the exam, use an honour agreement), but consider online exams to be open book. Let students know what resources they are allowed to use.
- Develop a shorter exam (with fewer questions) than you ordinarily would for an in-person exam. There is increased cognitive load involved in doing an online exam and technology may pose some impediments.
- All students may not be familiar with taking exams on an online platform. Be very clear and specific with your instructions, in particular around such things as time limits.
- Provide a wide time window to start the exam as not all students may be our time zone.
- Allow a submission grace period (e.g., 15 minutes extra time) to allow for potential Internet disruption, or technical glitches.
- Be aware that some students might not have adequate Internet access and may require accommodation.
- Be available to your students during your exam (e.g., by email).
- Remember that students will be stressed so try to be as open-minded and flexible as possible.
- Design the exam with the assumption that all online tests are open book.
Consider…
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Setting up and offering a practice/trial run of the online exam process.
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This trial should be done a week or two before the actual exam.
- You can create a very small (3 question) example exam that students have the option of working through.
- Consider using one or two questions from the actual exam pool. If the students know this, it might motivate them to do the practice example.
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- Setting a Due Date AND a later End Date in your exam (“restrictions” tab)
- This dual strategy will allow late submissions after the due date, but prevent submissions after the end date.
- Informing your students about how to contact you during the exam
- Let students know how to reach you during the exam: by email or other mechanisms of your choice.
- Indicate the date and times the channels will be monitored during the exam period (remember students may be in different time zones):
- answering exam questions, if time allows.
- dealing with online issues – e.g. WIFI issues.
For information about setting up quizzes in LEARN, please see the IST help page.
Other Considerations:
How long should students have to complete online tests?
1-2 minutes per question is a recommended minimum, depending on how long/complex the questions are (e.g., if students are retrieving knowledge about multiple concepts or are asked to think critically or analytically, add time for that). One rule of thumb is to time yourself reading the longest question twice, including all the answer options, and then double or triple the time. Also, keep in mind that you have “expert thinking” in the subject matter, while your students have “novice thinking” or “developing thinking” in the subject matter, so perhaps a bit of an extra time cushion is warranted, particularly in stressful conditions.
Concerns about academic integrity
Usually, the motivation to create tight time restrictions is a concern about academic integrity. However, there are other ways of addressing this concern:
- Write questions that are not so easily Googled (e.g., not fact questions, but questions that are applied to a scenario or integrate multiple concepts, as these are more difficult to simply look up on the spot).
- Keep online tests low-stakes (worth lower marks). Is there a way you can alter the grading scheme to provide a less stressful online final exam experience and at the same time keep the rigor and integrity of your course assessment?
- Include an honour statement (see CTE Teaching Tip: Making the Transition to Take Home Exams for an honour statement template.)
Remember that the shorter the time window, the more anxiety students may have, and the more anxiety they have, the more requests for accommodations/modifications instructors will likely receive.
If your students are unable to write the online exam for any reason, you will be advised to follow regular exam regulations.
Resources
- Keep Learning at UWaterloo
Support
If you would like support applying these tips to your own teaching, CTE staff members are here to help. View the CTE Support page to find the most relevant staff member to contact.
This Creative Commons license lets others remix, tweak, and build upon our work non-commercially, as long as they credit us and indicate if changes were made. Use this citation format: Making the Transition to Online Exams. Centre for Teaching Excellence, University of Waterloo.