Digital School Examinations: An Educational Note of an Innovative Practice


  •  Bernt Bertheussen    

Abstract

The aim of this study is was discuss the effectiveness of a digital school examination practice which was developed, and cultivated at a Norwegian university’s business school over a 9-year period. In this innovative practice, we intended to align the digital school examinations constructively into the course design, and we crafted examination questions and problems aiming to motivate students to acquire a deep learning approach. To hinder cheating on examinations where students brought their own devices, they worked with semi-indivual exam papers. The issues were common, but the students worked with specific data sets. Consequently, no solutions were equal. Empirical indications of effectiveness was derived from multiple sources: a survey, grade distributions, exam scores on question/problem types, and strings from the examination marking. The results show that students were satisfied using spreadsheets on the final school examination, which also motivated them to utilize a spreadsheet in their day-to-day learning activities. Moreover, we found it reasonable to affirm that semi-individual examinations hindered digital cheating.


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