Abstract:

Even before the COVID-19 Pandemic forced changes in the wider global society, online and technology supported education was growing rapidly. Its roots go back to the advent of postal services centuries ago and the beginning of educational broadcasting in the early 1920s. The Internet, which has been the most disruptive innovation of the past several decades, was suddenly relied on to deal with the Pandemic shutdowns. Unfortunately, most courses were not designed to fit the online teaching and learning environment and faculty were not trained or prepared to make the switch. Many simply transferred their usual practices to remote teaching by repurposing what they were doing in the classroom and asking less of students especially in regards to assignments and evaluations. But many faculty, both experienced and new to online learning, turned to online proctoring services to insure the integrity of their exams. We believe that this sudden dependency played a major role in the negative experiences students reported having with their online exam proctoring and the subsequent wave of reports in the popular media claiming that students across the U.S. are, for example, fearful of been wrongly flagged by online proctoring services and thus are not able to show their learning fairly. But the changes in society accelerated by the Pandemic are not likely to reverse. For example, a study by McKinsey and Company in collaboration with the market-research firm Ipsos surveying 25,000 Americans concluded that if the opportunity is offered to them, 87% of Americans would be happy to work from home and, we feel confident saying, this is likely to hold true for students and faculty alike vis a vis online learning and online proctored exams. If online proctoring is to remain a significant part of higher education, how should some of its purported problems be dealt with?

One highly important factor that has been missing in the media reports and concerns raised about online proctoring is the student anxiety supposedly caused by the proctoring and its effect on student performance. From the earliest example of civil service exams used in Imperial China two millennia ago to the present, exams are about passing judgement and this naturally engenders evaluation apprehension. In an exam situation, this is called test anxiety and it can cause lowered performance. In short, it is the fact of exam taking itself that can lead to high levels of anxiety and a negative effect on exam performance. Research on test anxiety goes back a century so this is no surprise to those even slightly familiar with the literature. What has been missed, we think, is the difference between state and trait anxiety and their relationship to online proctoring. In our previous research, we demonstrated that students with high trait anxiety are affected by that much more by it than they are by the online proctoring situation. We proposed some ways to ameliorate that and our current research is focused on the current online proctoring conversation. We propose to present at EDULEARN23 the results of our examination of current research on online proctoring as it relates to our previous research —specifically, those researchers citing our work on trait test anxiety as a personal variable and ethnic status and socio-economic status as social variables. In addition, we will share our conclusion about the state of current research and make some preliminary suggestions as to where it should be headed.

Keywords:

Online, Exam, Proctoring, Anxiety, Performance.