Thank you Sarah for your straightforward and honest recount of the last three years of working together on establishing online exams at D-HEST. It has been an industrious – and occasionally intense – but also successful journey.

Thank you also for making the survey results available to us. We have discussed your report and the survey results and would like to briefly comment on them:

5.1 – Room infrastructure

Room infrastructure is currently too limited to keep up with the demand for online exams. If larger (or better) room infrastructure is a concern for you, please write a letter to the rector. This is the best way you can help move things forward. HG G1 was made possible as a room for online exams in large part due to lecturers writing such letters.

5.2 – Testing

We are constantly improving our testing procedures. The entire infrastructure for online exams is routinely tested before the semester-end exam and session exam periods and components are always tested before updates. In the winter examination session HS2014/15 this has led to very stable infrastructure and we did not experience any noteworthy technical problems.

5.3 – Bugs/Kprime

We do our best to fix bugs as fast as possible and find reasonable workarounds where a first fix is not possible. The Matrix/Kprime question type contained several fairly severe bugs in summer 2014. Post hoc changes in question scoring led to data loss and data backups were dysfunctional. LET decided to retire the Matrix/Kprime question type in favor of a new Kprime question type that was developed from scratch. The new question type was finished in time for the session exams HS2014/15 in a version with reduced functionality. The missing functionality (e.g. import/export) will become available during FS2015, as soon as testing is finished.

5.4 – Correction

Post hoc corrections to scoring are possible in Moodle, but there are several pitfalls to consider. We will write a short manual on post hoc corrections to scoring in Moodle.

5.5 – Writing “good” online exams is challenging

There are several Didactica courses on good-practice in exam design. These are a good starting point. Furthermore, if there is sufficient interest amongst D-HEST examiners, LET would be willing to organize a half-day workshop on what could be done to further improve exam quality in D-HEST online exams.

We would like to thank everyone at D-HEST for their trust and commitment to making online exams work.

Best,
The LET online exams’ team
Tobias Halbherr, Marco Lehre, Antonia Bonaccorso, Kristina Isacson, Kai Reuter, Thomas Piendl, Claudia Schlienger