New Academic Policy requiring all exams and quizzes to be fully online

[apl68]

What's the advantage of taking an exam online if it is still necessary to be in a designated classroom?  I proctor exams at the library now and then, but these are students taking completely remote classes.  Do students have flexibility on the time they take their exams, or do they all have to be in the exam site at the same time?

[bio-nonymous]

What's the advantage of taking an exam online if it is still necessary to be in a designated classroom?  I proctor exams at the library now and then, but these are students taking completely remote classes.  Do students have flexibility on the time they take their exams, or do they all have to be in the exam site at the same time?

One advantage is that we can have color graphs, pictures, etc. in the questions that would be prohibitive in paper format. The test can be long page-wise (not question-wise--pictures to labels, graphs to interpret, passages to read, etc.) with having to print out more than a ream of paper for each exam. This is also similar to their licensing exam formats. Another plus is ease of grading, and ease of obtaining question metrics. It is also easy to change out exam questions year to year from the question bank of validated questions (see ease of obtaining question metrics) from prior exams.

The students take the exam at the same time in the same room (unless they have accommodations--other arrangements are made). This is a hybrid class: mostly in-person/partially asynchronous on-line.

[Aster]

After much grief and angst, my university has now clarified that no student will be forced into having to take his/her makeup exams in a fully online format unless that student's class is specifically designed to be a fully online course.

Apparently there were several ethical, professional and potentially legal red flags that came up when the senior management started asking for feedback instead of unilaterally making decisions.

Crisis averted.