UNIVERSITIES and colleges have developed alternative tools to assess their students when sitting examinations due to the Covid-19 epidemic, which saw a large part of learning and exams taking place online.

Instead of traditional exams to assess a student’s performance, these institutions of higher learning have pivoted to open-book exams conducted online to test for other critical thinking skills.

While they cannot completely run away from traditional forms of examinations, these are conducted with e-invigilation or proctoring to ensure students don’t cheat.

Professor Beverley Webster, vice president (education) at Monash University Malaysia said traditional exams where students come into a room and are supervised can be replicated online, is not the first choice for the university.

“Open-book and 12- or 24-hour exams where students are given an assessment task that requires research, thinking, drafting and reviewing before submission have become popular and, in many cases, preferred,” she told The Malaysian Insight.

This alternative method, she said, is more authentic and aligned to the learning outcomes of the courses as opposed to traditional exams, while also removing the risk of students cheating.

“E-invigilation or proctoring comes with a cost and also concerns about student privacy. The types of questions possible in these scenarios are limited to questions that require recall of knowledge.

“A far superior strategy is to consider the design of the assessment task, to develop a task that is staged, that requires scaffolding of knowledge and skills, that students will need to research, access multiple resources, and will need to consider how they are going to apply what they know and can do to complete the task,” Webster added.

While concerns have been brought up about the quality of graduates this type of assessment will create, Webster said, it in fact improves the quality of graduates and makes them more work-ready.

“They are developing capabilities that are going to benefit them when they graduate and commence their careers.

“Employers will and do recognise graduates with problem-solving skills, critical research skills, being able to work independently and think more creatively.”

Taylor’s University, which has invested in e-learning tools for the last decade, was able to seamlessly move towards online learning and assessment.

“All assignments were already using an online submission method via TIMeS (Taylor’s Integrated Moodle e-Learning System). Plagiarism software was already being used and no discretion was noticed,” Dr Joaquim Dias Soeiro, Head of School of Hospitality, Tourism and Events at Taylor’s University said.

“Some of the tests were already using the e-assessment mode in TIMeS. During the epidemic, more lecturers had to adopt e-methods and used online assessments, which enabled them to get results and feedback immediately.

“Reports, projects, assignments and evaluations followed a similar process pre-epidemic by using the plagiarism software integrated in our LMS hence, these assessments were not affected by the change of learning environment.”

For exams that required proctoring, Dias Soeiro said the university used tools such as Zoom and Safe Exam Browser.

“This tool blocks the web browser and students will only be able to attempt the exam they are currently doing. The recent and latest tool used is AI Proctoring, which is a more developed tool using AI to invigilate students.”

Dias Soeiro said students graduating during the epidemic are not of lesser quality; they merely have different experiences than their predecessors.

“Online exams or online education does not affect quality in terms of reducing the students’ abilities but affects the learning experience by enhancing other capabilities.”

No issues for students with online exams

Arvind De Silva, 19 who is studying architecture at University of Melbourne said he did not face any challenges in sitting his exams online.

“I didn’t really have many challenges but some of my classmates had to do their exam really late at night or early in the morning because of the time differences with Melbourne,” he said.

His university also adopted an open-book concept for their exams as it was not able to keep an eye on all the students and make sure they don’t cheat.

“The exams were open-book because of the nature of online exams whereby the university can’t control everybody. So because of that they were quite easy considering I had access to my notes and online resources.”

In order to facilitate students who were having any problems with the tests, De Silva said his university also offered a support hotline for technical difficulties or any other issues.

A communications student at Open University said while sitting an online exam is a new experience, the university made it as simple as possible for the students.

“We were told the exam duration would be longer than the usual physical exams. Normal is about two and a half hours. The online exam was about six hours.

“Since it was online, the questions (essay) were not from the module. It was more opinion-based,” the students who spoke on condition of anonymity told The Malaysian Insight.

While he did not face any problems sitting the exams online, the student said it would have been a challenge for those in rural areas due to bad internet connection.

“Not sure how those in the rural areas or students solely dependent on mobile data did.” – September 27, 2021.