Upping the stakes

There are times when an assessment means more than a little gentle encouragement that you’re moving in the right direction. If you need a pass to obtain an academic or professional qualification that could transform your career, then the stakes have upped considerably. In these circumstances, is online assessment really an option? According to Hoyle, “There are limitations in any remote assessment. You can always cheat if you really want to.” Even with the most advanced biometric technology, utilising fingerprint, voice, face or eye recognition, there’s nothing to stop you taking the exam with your extremely-knowledgeable friend sitting alongside you to supply you with the answers. When the stakes get high, the exam simply has to be invigilated.

This does not mean that online assessment is an inappropriate tool for high-profile exams, just that the exams should not be taken remotely. If you have the facilities available to provide each student taking the exam with access to a networked PC, then you are still going to benefit from a number of advantages. Firstly, there are no paper copies of the exam to be printed, distributed, or left lying round for prying eyes to see. Secondly, papers can be scored almost instantly and results fed back to administrators and students. Also, to further reduce the risk of cheating, particularly where the same exam papers are used repeatedly, you can automatically mix the order of questions and of items within questions. It’s also important to ensure that the answers to the questions can not be deduced by a streetwise student who takes a look at the HTML source – that means encoding the answers or, better still, making scoring a task that’s carried out at the server end.