Remote Teaching: Designing Trustworthy Assessments
Online exam proctoring has been a hot topic in our move from face-to-face to remote instruction this Spring. The Institute is currently recommending no test proctoring be used, so how do you design assessments that allow your students to demonstrate mastery of course content and skills in a remote environment while maintaining the high level of academic integrity face-to-face assessments allow? In this white paper, Dr. David Joyner, Executive Director of Online Education, College of Computing, Georgia Tech, explains his experience with digital proctoring, why he believes it is not a viable solution in our current situation, and ways to minimize the potential for cheating online:
“The rush to emergency remote teaching due to COVID-19 has many instructors looking to perform near-replacements of in-person activities; by that I mean, we appropriately strive, given these emergency circumstances, to find 1:1 replacements for what we would be doing in person. For tests, the 1:1 replacement would appear to be digital proctoring services.
There are lots of digital proctoring services out there. I personally use ours extensively: four of my five classes use digital proctoring, covering 11 exams and over 3800 individual sessions this semester alone. I like to use it because in a purely online program, we need frequent assertions that students are doing their own work, of the kind we would get naturally if they were in our physical classrooms.
Should You Use Online Proctoring? Probably Not
I provide that disclaimer to note that I’m not a detractor with regard to online proctoring in general; it has an important role to play…Digital proctoring is enormously valuable in programs where students know they are signing up for an online program in the first place and can self-assess their ability to participate in the necessary activities to succeed; that is not the situation we find ourselves in…”
Download the full white paper, Designing Trustworthy Assessments without Proctoring, here.
