9 Alternatives to Timed Online Exams

• Designing Online Exams: choosing a platform, question types, etc.
  • Exam platform feature comparison
• Deployment of Online Exams: technical considerations before and during the exam.
• Academic Integrity considerations
  • Online invigilation using Zoom
• Handwritten Responses
• Exam Accommodations
• Canvas FAQs & Lessons Learned from Online Exams

• Academic Integrity: ideally, you create an assignment that discourages cheating, but in any case, you may also consider asking students to (digitally) sign an explicit integrity pledge and/or a form of online invigilation if necessary (see the Academic Integrity section for details).
• Allowing exams to be open-book: assume students will use resources while taking an exam, and even encourage them to do so. Try to ask questions that probe deeper levels of knowledge and understanding, enabling students to apply, assess, and evaluate concepts and facts in meaningful ways. Encourage students to share and cite where they get information from and what resources they use, and be clear about which resources are not to be used, for example include instructions to clarify that any sort of reading might be okay but students should not actively solicit answers from websites.
• Encourage students to collaborate/share questions and ideas: students will likely work together when they are stuck or confused. You can encourage working in small teams and ask them to include who they work with and in what ways.
• Focus on solving problems while showing work and explanations: in many cases, students may get the same answer, but showing their work reveals meaningful differences in understanding. Sometimes there may only be a few ways to show work, so you may ask for brief prose explanations or have students record a video of them talking through the process to solve a question.
• Consider student-generated questions with explanations: instead of trying to ensure everyone answers your limited number of questions on their own, ask every student to create their own question with an explanation of how it would assess a certain topic or skill in a meaningful way. You can also assign students to answer each other’s questions and state whether those questions actually do assess these skills in appropriate ways.
• Respect your own time: most of these ideas take time to grade. Try to determine what is feasible in your situation, and use feedback-based or hand-grading intensive assessments sparingly. Also, consider how much feedback students actually need/will use. Many times feedback can be created for the whole group based on common challenges or problems, as opposed to individual responses.
• Discover student access needs for your proposed technology: internet and equipment availability will vary among students; prior to the exam period, you can survey students and/or test the technology solution you are intending to use to determine its feasibility and any accommodations that might be needed.

Recommended for any course that can manage the grading load, a take-home test would mean that students have a substantial period of time (perhaps 1-2 days) to complete the test and upload their responses.Consider question formats leading to essays, videos, pictures, and other personal responses (on specific course topics or reflection on learning in the course). If your class lends itself to it, having students express their learning through essays, videos, pictures, or other personalized forms of writing/speaking/communicating means that everyone needs to create their own. You can also have students post their responses for each other and assess each other’s work through peer grading (note: some prior training/practice in peer grading for little/no grades is important to making this effective). Rubrics can help guide students as they develop such work and give each other feedback, and, of course, allow your teaching assistants and you a consistent method of assessment.

Response submission possibilities include:

• • If written responses can be submitted in a text format, students could submit via a Canvas assignment by pasting directly into an open response question (or upload a document – see https://community.canvaslms.com/docs/DOC-10151-415241295 for options).
  • For tests that require handwritten responses (e.g., include diagrams or computations that won’t fit in online text boxes), students could be asked to print a test (this may be difficult to achieve consistently with all students!) or work on blank paper and submit completed work digitally, like taking pictures of the pages with their phone and uploading those as pictures or as a PDF; see the section Handwritten Responses for details.
  • More general digital file submissions are also possible: students could upload a document, video, etc.
  • Other platforms may support certain kinds of submissions; for example, students could submit a blog post to a course WordPress site.

Again dependent on class size and technology feasibility for students, but you could have each student respond to a few questions live in order to assess their grasp of the course material (this has been piloted in in-person lab courses already). This is time-intensive to do but the subsequent grading time is minimal, and it solves the invigilation issue. You could create several separate Zoom sessions, with a team of examiners enrolled as Alternative Hosts so that they can start Zoom sessions at the same time.