Online exams may seem practical and straightforward, but the reality is much less pleasing. Online exams feel impersonal, don’t create the proper mindset, invade privacy and are unnecessary. Furthermore, more studies have shown that students do worse on online tests than those on paper.
Online exams leave students prone to unfair point deductions. When you begin the exam, there are many steps you must take to prove your environment is free of anything you could use to cheat. These steps can add so much stress to the process of taking an exam. You must do so many things to prove you are not cheating, making it easy to mess up. If you mess up one of the steps, proctors will take point deductions from your exam. You can also lose points for turning your head away for too long, for which there may be ample reasons, such as using scratch paper or a calculator. Moving your head out of frame displays a message and can become a distraction. Messing up or staying out of frame makes you lose a considerable amount of points. Not to mention that proctors will have to sit and watch students to make sure they aren’t cheating. This is also an additional source of unnecessary stress for students and a large waste of time for proctors.
There are also many factors outside of student’s control, especially for people who live on campus. Having to ask a roommate to leave or stay in one spot and be silent during an online exam is unfair to all parties involved and there is no guarantee that the roommate will agree to that.
According to futureed.com, one study showed that when taking two students of similar academic ability, the one who took a test online scored lower than the one who took the paper test. They found that there were significant deviations, “up to 5.4 months of learning in math and 11 months of learning in ELA (lost) in a single year.” The implication of this is that students will do worse on online exams, especially in English and math. Why would this be the standard form of testing when we know this to be true? It sets students up for failure.
Online exams create problems for students academically. They are proven to cause students to score lower than they would on an in-person paper exam. They can create stress for the student and take up a proctor’s time. I argue that in-person paper exams should be the standard, though there should be online options for students with disabilities and students at a higher risk of contracting COVID-19. Reach out to your professor and find out if there is a way to take your exams in person; it may save your grade.
