Hi Craig,

 

I went through this exact process at a previous institution a couple of years ago. We had an online exam for 970 students and only had the capacity for 120 in our largest computer lab.

 

1)      Do you encourage ‘shifts’ where cohorts sit the exam in shifts throughout the day to space out numbers?

 

We ran in a series of shifts, in some situations over a number of days. The exam was designed so that a bank of 400% of the required questions were available and all questions were moderated and weighted to ensure each student had an equal experience. Then students were provided a randomised exam unique to them meaning the chances of two students getting the same series of questions was minimal.

 

2)      Do you have any specific policies in your examination regulations about online exams (e.g. policies around network failure, technical issues etc)

 

The online exams were invigilated exactly like a paper exam (the only difference is the answer to questions 3). For each exam we ensured ITS were informed, that there was no network work planned, and that there was a named member of the ITS team available via a batphone. Where there was an outage or fire alarm (we did have a fire alarm during one exam) the exam was simply paused, students downed tools, and then we restarted once the issue was resolved. There was no automated timer or anything on the exam meaning we could easily do this, and it also made additional time for students easier to manage as well.

 

There were concerns that not having an automated timer against the exam would mean students could take longer (e.g. by leaving the session running and continuing outside the room) but in the VLE we were using (Moodle) you could export the start and finish times which meant this could be monitored and dealt with retrospectively.

 

3)      Do you ‘lock down’ your PC’s during examinations (we are testing Impero and would be happy to share our findings)

 

We used Netschool Support. This allowed us to lock down web access etc and to monitor all the student screens. However, to be honest, we ended up not locking down the machines. It was more bother than it was worth. Instead we had an invigilator monitoring a rolling view of all student screens. They looked for obvious tells such as additional software open in the task bar, extra web browser tabs open etc and were this was spotted we could identify the student by the PC number and approach them quickly to investigate.

 

Hope this helps. Any other questions, get in touch.

 

 

 

 

Apologies for cross posting….

 

We are currently investigating how to best support our growing number of online examinations (usually using Blackboard). At some of our sites, we do not have large enough computer pool rooms to cater for all students in a cohort (e.g. 200 students) which results in multiple rooms being utilised at any one time, stretching technical staff.

 

I wondered if anyone would share their experiences of how they cater for large scale computer based examinations? Specifically:

 

1)      Do you encourage ‘shifts’ where cohorts sit the exam in shifts throughout the day to space out numbers?

2)      Do you have any specific policies in your examination regulations about online exams (e.g. policies around network failure, technical issues etc)

3)      Do you ‘lock down’ your PC’s during examinations (we are testing Impero and would be happy to share our findings)

 

 

Many thanks in advance

 

Craig Wakefield

 

Learning Technologies Adviser

University of Brighton (Eastbourne Campus)

 

Tel: 01273 64 (4112)

Mob: 07964431090

Twitter: @craig_wakefield

Blog: https://blogs.brighton.ac.uk/elearning/

 

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