Beyond Lockdown: Towards Reliable e-Assessment

Abstract

In modern university education, lectures and accompanying exercises and tutorials incorporate digital elements to keep up with a general trend of digitalization. These digital elements spread from incorporating online learning management systems into the lectures to the usage of computers and tablets in exercises and tutorials. Despite e-Assessment being a valuable component in form of self-tests and formative assessment, the trend of digitalization has not yet been transferred on examinations. Retaining examinations on paper is often caused by reservations against e-Assessment, but also financial reasons interfere with the establishment of e-Assessment, because maintaining a suitable IT-infrastructure for e-Assessment is expensive in terms of money as well as administrative effort. Bring Your Own Device is a potential solution to this issue, but also poses new challenges regarding the integrity and reliability of examinations, hence potentially boosting the existing reservations. A common approach for securing e-Assessment is the usage of a so-called lockdown software on the students’ devices, which is intended to ensure that students cannot execute impermissible actions during the examination. This paper exposes the disadvantages of current lockdown approaches in the Bring Your Own Device setting and outlines a novel alternative to securing e-Assessments. It thus contributes to reducing reservations against e-Assessment.