Abstract:

The Faculty of Economics and Business of the University of Debrecen started the semester in September with traditional, in person education despite the pandemic. Teaching a lecture to a group of twenty students in a small, twenty-seater seminar room was not an issue for the faculty, even with the lack of ability of social distancing, as long as people wore their mask and the tables were disinfected between lectures. However, paper-based exams were no longer permitted, so all examinations had to take place online. We learned from our experiences of the spring lockdown, when teaching materials and online tests had to continuously be created week by week to offer an alternative to the planned, in person lectures and practicals. Therefore over the summer we created a quiz database that covers most of the Business Mathematics course. As our freshmen come from different backgrounds, the course starts with sets and ends with derivation and analysing functions. We were able to generate some of the exercises by computer, but in many cases we had to prepare them manually. In this article, we present our quiz database, our experiences and our students’ opinions regarding online examination.

Since the format of practicals/seminars was traditional, but exams were required to be taken online, we provided students with three-to-five questions every week in the form of a self-assessment quiz related to the actual topic, to allow them to familiarise themselves with the exam environment. To encourage this kind of practice we awarded the best solutions with extra points. Considering the number of quizzes, this could even mean a higher grade at the end of the semester.
The first exam was written on 19th October in a computer room under controlled conditions. We had some worries that the limited number of manually crafted tests would affect our students’ chances of achieving good results. Nevertheless, the actual result, which was 65 percent on average was very close to last year’s paper-based test results, which was 60 percent on average.

From the student feedback, the most prominent point was the displeasure at the absence of sub-points. That is, the questions were all-or-nothing type questions, and any minor mistakes, such as making an error on defining the closed/open end of an interval resulted in the student receiving zero points on their answer. Naturally, we also need to highlight the benefit students had with the multiple choice questions, where in case of faulty solutions they had an opportunity to notice their error and fix it, or even make an educated guess for the correct solution. Additionally, there was also the opportunity to use the solutions to backwards engineer the correct answer.

Our results show that the loss acquired by the lack of sub-points and the benefits of the test environment balanced out, since the average results were very similar to that of the previous midterm exams.

Keywords:

Teaching mathematics, online assessment.