Abstract:

During the lockdown imposed by the Covid-19 pandemic, Universities had to face the problem of online examining students at the end of the various courses planned in their bachelor and master degrees.

The approach initially proposed by the University governance – i.e., oral exams – quickly revealed too limiting for a University characterized by a large spectrum of degrees (offered by height faculties: Agricultural and Food Sciences, Humanities, Law, Medicine, Pharmacy, Political, Economic and Social Sciences, Science and Technology, Veterinary Medicine, and 2 schools: Exercise and Sport Sciences, Language Mediation and Intercultural Communication) and a huge number of students (almost 62˙000 in academic year 19/20). In fact, it is impossible in an oral exam to ask students to solve problems requiring (even a short) autonomous work, it is hard to find a set of equally difficult questions and above all oral exams require an excessive time to evaluate hundreds of students.

After several investigations and tests, a very effective solution has been found by the author of this paper. Such a solution is based on the following element:
• students proctoring is performed by teachers/collaborators using web conference platforms like e.g. Microsoft Teams or Zoom to monitor groups of 20-30 students at a time;
• students connect to the web conference using their smartphones, positioned behind their workplace to let the teacher monitor both students and their desktop;
• the exam is taken by students using the exam.net platform, implemented by the Swedish company Teachiq AB and free to use outside Sweden during 2020; such a platform has the following main characteristics:
o a teacher interface very intuitive, facilitating creation and test of exams typically constituted by a few open-answer questions;
o a feature allowing the teacher to see in real time what the student is writing;
o a nice chat support, allowing the teacher to interact with single students without disturbing the overall group;
o the possibility for students to use some support for drawing simple graphs and writing mathematical expressions:
o the possibility for students to include pictures of hand written work, taken through their smartphone.

The proposed solution has been adopted by more than 600 teachers, who during the first month were able to test more than 12˙000 students in 1˙333 exam sessions.

The paper will illustrate in details the arrangement required to perform these kind of exams and will discuss updated figures regarding the adoption of the proposed solution during the summer exam session.

Keywords:

Online written exams, student monitoring, proctoring.