Post-Covid online assessment
The assessment of knowledge and skills is still done remotely for many schools or training centers. To avoid passing the virus on to other candidates sitting in the same exam room, online tests seem to be the best of the solutions offered to date. But what impact will this new evaluation modality have on the habits of examiners and candidates once they have emerged from the clutches of Covid-19?
A private evaluation of contact but also accuracy
Many students are saturated with the idea of having to pass partials or online competitions. They have been abandoned by the institutions in the learning process and feel the inequality in the design of the exams and in their correction. “The examiners assume that you have all the information you need for the test at hand and that you will necessarily use it. They therefore make the exam subjects more complicated than they would normally have given in the exam room. This felt injustice is also accompanied by the fear of being poorly graded. If examiners assume that everyone is going to cheat, then how do you judge a student who answered all the questions correctly? Did he cheat or did he just learn very well?
“They are fed up, but me, it suits me! »
If we have students who, once the pandemic is far behind us, will never want to take remote assessments again, we also have a large part of them who find advantages in this new method of awarding examination or competition. Among the main arguments there is in particular the reduction of stress related to the exam because candidates can choose a quiet, comfortable and distraction-free room or place to take a test, an environment that de-stresses them and allows them to concentrate. Another advantage that the candidates find in this test is to be able to use digital tools such as word processing, which allows a correct layout, facilitates rapid writing without however worrying about the quality of the calligraphy but above all which makes it possible to less spelling mistakes, something examiners used to penalize for face-to-face exams.
A temporary solution or a beneficial change for later?
Today, more and more doubts related to the reliability of online assessments are removed thanks to the presence of platforms such as TestWe which make it possible to ensure proper compliance with the instructions for taking online exams. Schools, universities or even training centers find advantages in this new method of evaluation, in particular budgetary advantages, human resources for the supervision and correction of tests, the possibility of using software which facilitates the work without affect test reliability.