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 and two schools. 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, we identified two solutions for written exams:
1 - in case of huge exam sessions (100 or more students to be examined) automated proctoring by (costly) commercial products has been adopted;
2 - for less than 100 students, the adopted solution has the following characteristics:
2.1 - 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;
2.2 - students connect to the web conference using their smartphones, positioned behind their workplace to let the teacher monitor both students and their desktop;
2.3 - exams are taken by students using the exam.net platform, implemented by the Swedish company Teachiq AB.

This paper concentrates on the results of application of the above solutions for one complete academic year (from May 2020 to April 2021) compared with a normal, non-pandemic year (2018-19). In particular, the following aspects will be analyzed in detail:
A - number of exams handled in the different ways, during the various months and by the teachers belonging to the different faculties/schools;
B - average grade (i.e., measure of her/his level of competence, ranging from 18/30 to 30/30 cum laude in the Italian system) attributed to students, again during the various months and by the teachers belonging to the different faculties/schools;
C - different types of exams chosen by teachers before and during pandemic.

Just to give a feeling of the numbers, our university has more than 60.000 students, and more than 150.000 written exams resulted in a final grade, both in 2018-19 and in 2020-21.

Keywords:

Online written exams, grades by month, grades by faculty.