Online Assessment - The Pros and Cons

During the first semester of 2020, many instructors in higher education were left scrambling to move their exams and assessments online in light of COVID-19. For many, it was a sudden change and one that brought institutions face-to-face with a whole range of complex challenges.

However, the quick switch to online assessment and digital testing platforms was also a real learning experience for instructors, forcing everyone to rethink course design and best practices around student knowledge measurements, potentially for good.

While online assessments may come along with some perceived disadvantages, the truth is that evolving to digital assessments, provides a whole range of benefits for instructors and learners alike.

So, what are some advantages of online assessment and where might professors experience downfalls? In this article, we’ll discuss the pros and cons of online testing for instructors to consider during ongoing remote learning.

What are the pros and how do I implement them?

Digital assessment platforms support both formative and summative assessments. This means that they are ideal for monitoring student learning throughout the semester, as well as for running final exams. But here, let’s focus first on why they work so well for summative testing.

Way before the 2020 global pandemic (and still to this day, but to a diminishing degree), many post-secondary students would write exams using a pen and paper in a controlled, physical environment - like a classroom or exam hall. In a scene familiar to us all, the exams would be printed out, placed face down on desks, and exam administrators would walk up and down the aisles to supervise nervous test takers. Once completed, teaching assistants or instructors would spend hours marking the tests and inputting grades. This has always been viewed as a rather labour intensive and time-consuming task.

On the other hand, online assessment streamlines a lot of these formalities - and can make exams far easier to prepare, deliver, manage and evaluate.

Instructors who are able to implement online assessments have more resources to design their exams using a variety of digital tools that support popular summative testing types. These exams can then be taken online from the comfort of a student’s home, which may help to ease nerves. And since students are largely accustomed to using digital platforms, assessments can also be completed in significantly less time; after all, most people can type faster than they can write by hand. 

Online proctors are available to oversee students via video and ensure testing standards are upheld. Better yet, well-designed assessment platforms automatically grade assignments for instructors, giving them the opportunity to spend less time marking, and more time educating.

In fact, course leaders who use our platform Connect, which features ready-made course content and assessment tools, say they spend 72% less time on admin tasks, and an incredible 90% more time on teaching.

Of course, online testing platforms help instructors to efficiently manage formative assessment, too. One of the biggest reasons for this is that the platforms enable instructors to monitor student progress throughout the course, live.

For example, Connect features actionable dashboards, which present instructors with easy-to-digest reports on individual students, assignments, or the entire class. Gathering this data on class progress helps teachers to automatically identify areas students are struggling in. They can then pivot quicker to provide learners with more support on an individual or class level.

Personalised learning aims to address the diverse interests, backgrounds, and needs of individual students. It’s something educational psychologist Benjamin Bloom advocated for.

No teaching technique can be a 'one size fits all' approach. However, in higher education, which often consists of large class sizes and focuses heavily on autonomous learning, personalised education can be hard to put into action. That’s where online assessment platforms come in. Real-time assessments of students gives instructors the ability to give individual feedback. This can help students retain information quicker, learn from mistakes, boost confidence, improve motivation - and ultimately, exceed their learning goals.

For more personalised learning tools, you can learn more about our powerful adaptive reading and learning tool SmartBook, that lives within Connect. SmartBook uses adaptive learning technology and algorithms to personalise a student’s reading and learning experience in order to promote concept mastery and good student study habits. 

Higher education institutions typically assess students using final exams. But not all exams adequately measure student learning outcomes, and often don’t result in students proving a gain in important problem-solving or critical thinking skills.

However, now that the traditional formal assessment model has been tested by the global pandemic, there is an opportunity for instructors to discover and apply some unique alternatives to exams and they have the potential to motivate students to succeed. Think about learning portfolios, presentations with industry experts, or role-play simulations.

For more creative assessment ideas and tips on how to apply them, you may want to read a related post ‘Is there an alternative to formal assessment’.

This all looks pretty good… but tell me about the cons?

As many instructors learned through the pandemic, moving assessments to online isn’t exactly a no-brainer. Like everything in higher education, it’s a process that requires careful consideration and can attract a lot of criticism from people who care deeply about seeing students succeed.

And, on this being not so fast: simply picking up pen-and-paper exams and moving them online isn’t often effective, realistic or even an option. There are plenty of tasks that don’t work in online exams and there are many questions that are too difficult to carry out on a computer, like writing equations or drawing diagrams, and it wouldn’t be fair to ask students to do them until these platforms are improved.

So, more likely than not, many instructors may have to re-design their exams in one way or another for online assessment.

On the other hand, online platforms contain resources that provide plenty of support, and enable instructors to design their assessments using a handful of digital tools. For example, our digital platform Connect, features ready-made and customisable test banks that allow instructors to pool and randomise questions - including multiple choice, true or false and ranking questions, as well as algorithmic problem sets and questions that have learners label diagrams. The questions are also labelled by Bloom’s Taxonomy, making it easy for instructors to choose tasks based on learning outcomes.

Exam security is a huge concern for instructors moving to online assessment. Because, let’s face it, a small number of students do cheat, especially when they’re in an uncontrolled environment.

One of our customers, Qatar-based Spanish teacher Ali Abdullah, shared his experience with us in this case study in 2017. During his online assessments using Connect, students were sending screenshots to their peers using WhatsApp and questions to Spanish tutors outside of the class.

That’s when he took a closer look at Connect’s exam features. Using the platform, he created a controlled exam environment by locking down students’ browsers. He then designed a pool to randomise questions, so no two students had the same assessment, and added a timer within the testing platform. This way, students would forget about cheating with peers, and focus more on getting their own answers right and problem-solving to find the correct choice.

While Ali’s tests were taken in the physical classroom, Connect also offers security boasts for students taking exams from afar. Since fall 2020, Connect will feature remote proctoring and student identity verification through Proctorio - helping instructors to ensure no student has breached assessment protocol from home.

While making the switch may be daunting, there are a huge range of benefits for instructors leveraging online assessment tools. We would say, that the pros outweigh the cons. But what do you think?

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