How The Cantonal Schools of Argovia found their online assessment tool for final summative exams

About the school

The Cantonal Schools of Argovia (Kantonsschulen Aargau) form a group of six upper secondary schools in Switzerland, which all have a formal summative examination at the end of the final year. Dominique Burger is the principal of the upper secondary school for adult education within this school group (Aargauische Maturitätsschule für Erwachsene – AME), as well as a member of the IT Strategy Committee for all six schools. This committee was tasked with finding a digital examination tool for these formal end of school examinations, to be implemented across all six schools in August 2022.

Challenges

Although the schools had previously moved on from paper exams and were using USB sticks with a secure mode for examinations, an entirely web-based, digital examination tool was sought after to replace this method. The IT Strategy Committee came to the conclusion that this tool would need to fulfill the following requirements:

It should be secure so that the students are isolated from the internet and thus the risk of plagiarism is reduced.
The software should be reliable enough to be able to adapt to unforeseen technical difficulties, such as internet failure or the breakdown of a student device.
The platform should work securely on all the different student devices.
It should be user-friendly and therefore easy to implement and introduce to both staff and students.
It should be competitively priced.

Given that this final assessment has such an impact on the academic future of the students, it was imperative that these criteria be fulfilled so that examinations would run smoothly and the exam experience could therefore be as stress-free as possible for the students themselves.

Exam.net not only fulfilled the committee’s requirements but was also the most secure and reliable platform and by far the best value for money.

Solutions

Several other digital assessment tools were considered and tested, both Swiss and international products. Exam.net not only fulfilled the committee’s requirements but was also the most secure and reliable platform and by far the best value for money.

“In looking at other options for a digital assessment tool, Exam.net won the race.”

Dominique Burger,
Principal and member of the IT Strategy Committee

Once Exam.net was chosen, the task then remained to implement it within the schools and introduce it to both staff and students. This proved to be a remarkably easy process from an administration perspective, with no need for time-consuming workshops or training sessions. Even staff who are less proficient in IT have adapted very quickly to using Exam.net.

“Exam.net is so user-friendly and self-explanatory that neither staff nor students needed much help.”

Benefits

Staff examination experience

The staff is appreciating the monitoring and proctoring features in Exam.net where the progress of the students can be followed in real time, the examination can be finished for all students simultaneously, or individual students can be given extra time; just to name a few features.

Student examination experience

The students feel very comfortable using Exam.net, especially since they are able to use their own device without fear of compatibility issues. They have also appreciated the calm examination experience, with disruptions limited by the use of the chat function, whereby a student can communicate directly with the teacher inside the exam window. Students with writing challenges have also benefited from the various accommodations available in the exam window, for example, spelling and translation support.

“For the IT team, the whole examination process is much more efficiently managed than before.”

Effective assessment process

The short time window for teachers to complete the marking of the final examinations has always been a busy time. The introduction of Exam.net has meant that the whole process can be handled digitally.

In particular, the staff have noticed the following time-saving aspects of using Exam.net:

Student work can be sent digitally between teachers for collaborative marking.
Teachers can sit remotely when marking exams, rather than around a paper-filled table.
Student work can be sent digitally to an external moderator, instead of in the post.

In addition, the following features of Exam.net have been an added bonus for the whole process:

Typed texts mean that illegible student handwriting is no longer an issue.
If plagiarism is suspected, the text-development history can be seen in Exam.net.

“For the teacher’s workload it’s a huge advantage to have student work produced in the same digital format.”

Dominique Burger,
Principal and member of the IT Strategy Committee

Going Forward

Currently Exam.net is mostly being used within the language departments, but Dominique envisages that more departments will soon follow suit. Staff are being encouraged to not only use Exam.net for final, summative assessments, but also for formative assessments during the progress of a course. As with any effective teaching and learning tool, word spreads quickly from teacher to teacher, and it will be very interesting for the IT Strategy Committee to oversee developments over the coming few months.

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