Abstract:

This paper focuses on opportunities and challenges of higher education assessment in the times of pandemic. Assessment is a value-driven activity, the heart of the learning process. In practice, it is often associated solely with measuring students' academic success and is easily reduced to quantitative indicators of achievement of learning outcomes of a particular course. Yet, due to the recent educational paradigm shift, assessment has become an important part of young people’s professional training and it continues to play an important role in their formal and informal lifelong learning process. Preparation for exams and the ways they are administered contribute to students’ general competences as well as to their practical knowledge and skills. Assessment in the times of pandemic puts new challenges before educators. Teaching was transferred from lecture halls to the virtual environment in a very short time and without adequate preparation. Assessment which used to work in face-to-face situations needed to be adjusted or even replaced in these new circumstances. It is our opinion that online assessment opens up certain possibilities of introducing new, innovative techniques of monitoring students’ work, but also has numerous risks and challenges. Some of the challenges include both achieving academic standards and objectivity and reliability of final grades.

The aim of this paper is to get insight into students’ experience of online assessment and establish advantages, risks and challenges of this type of assessment from their perspective. It is presumed that the experience of online assessment is dominantly negative, despite some advantages perceived by students, such as the fact that online tests cannot be supervised in full. Research was conducted in the spring of 2021 among Croatian undergraduate students of professional studies through an online survey. Results of the survey are discussed and some solutions for the perceived issues are offered in hope of improving the overall assessment process. The authors stress the need to carefully devise students’ activities and carry out assessment in controlled environment thus minimising or even eliminating possibility of students’ unethical conduct.

Keywords:

COVID-19 pandemic, online assessment, higher education, attitudes of students, Croatia.