Video surveillance in the living room and ban on cereal boxes: Where privacy ends and assessment begins

Description

The ways of assessment changed a lot as a result of the transition to online lecturing during the Covid-19 pandemic. While the possibility of cheating - especially in an online setting - can never be completely excluded the increasing number of individual tasks can help the reviewers to recognize, if a student fulfilled the tasks on his/her own and if he/she understood the course content. In higher education, the focus tends to be on a rigorous way of describing, how the surroundings of the examinee and the sharing of graphical content (eg. screen, desktop environment) has to be arranged. On this basis we analyzed the rules of conduct concerning remote examinations of the public universities in Austria and compared it with available studies concerning (online-) exam situations and (complementing) alternative assessment methods. We found that there is a fine line between reducing the possibility of cheating and influencing the exam situation through the mentioned measures in an inadequate extent. We therefore suggest a combination of diverse assessment methods, dependent on the field of study. We illustrate this approach with an exemplary examination that was conducted in 2020.

Period	05 Nov 2021
Event title	Innovating Higher Education Conference
Event type	Conference
Location	ItalyShow on map