Teaching with Technology

During the several years that I have been involved in supporting distance education and working with faculty members who are using, one of the most frequent comments I have heard is about the need to have students come to campus for tests.  With almost no exceptions, every faculty member stresses their concern about student cheating on tests. Their concerns range from that of ensuring that the person taking the test is really the student enrolled in the course to being worried about whether the student is using supplementary material that would not be permitted in a monitored testing environment.

Some faculty have developed testing methods with which they are satisfied, such as the use of test question banks to ensure that no two students get the same questions in the same order. Others use a unique data set for each student so they can use the same questions to verify student understanding of the material. In some classes, essay questions assess student internalized understanding of the material such that earlier student work can be compared to the test responses. However, there are still faculty who insist that the only way they will be satisfied is to have the students take the test in a proctored environment and the Mason Distance Education Council has been exploring options including campus testing centers, the use of proprietary testing companies, and standardized proctoring requirements. All of these solutions involve a cost and are therefore not optimal.

Thus, I was intrigued to find the article, “The Impact of Online Assessment on Grades in Community College Distance Education Mathematics Courses” by Ronald Yates and Brian Beaudrie. The authors of the article analyzed 850 test grades from students enrolled in five different mathematics courses. Of those grades, 406 were for students who took their tests in a supervised environment and the remaining 444 tests were taken purely online with no supervision. An analysis of the results showed no significant difference in test grades between each grouping of students, either aggregated across all five courses or within a given course.  Interestingly, although the difference was not significant, students in some classes who took the unsupervised tests did worse than those who were supervised. The authors reached the conclusion that cheating was not likely as that would have resulted in significantly higher grades for the students taking the tests online.

Although I don’t expect the results of this study to sway the beliefs of most of our faculty, it might convince some of them to consider online testing in more situations. One circumstance that faculty might consider is when predicted weather conditions put extra stress on the students. Allowing those who can’t get to campus to take the test online and seeing the results might convince some faculty of the validity of this study.

Yates, R. W., & Beaudrie, B. (2009). The Impact of Online Assessment on Grades in Community College Distance Education Mathematics Courses. American Journal of Distance Education, 23(2), 62. doi: 10.1080/08923640902850601.