Converting an examination in exam halls to a remote take-home exam or other remote take-home assignment

Putting questions more clearly into a context

If a question is intended to test factual knowledge, it should be put into a context, which the students have to consider when they formulate their answer. In exams in an exam hall, questions like the following are not uncommon:

• What is dissonance-reducing buying behaviour and variety-seeking buying behaviour?

That kind of question will, however, not work in a take-home exam or other take-home assignment when students can easily find definitions in the course readings or online. One solution could then be to have the students explain what the concepts might mean in a certain context and ask them to construct examples that even non-specialists can understand:

• Explain in an introduction for start-up business owners in the beauty industry the difference between dissonance-reducing and variety-seeking buying behaviour and illustrate the two concepts with clear examples.

Students must then demonstrate that not only are they able to describe different forms of buying behaviours but also that they have the ability to find or construct examples from a specific industry that can help others to understand consumer behaviour.

Making questions more individually relatable

Another way of avoiding questions where answers will be taken directly from the course readings is to include the students in the question. If you have the students make decisions, make choices, draw on their own experiences and link the problem to their own interests, you will at the same time make it easier for the students to come up with original answers. Exams in an exam hall often include questions such as:

• What, according to the opening clause of the Health and Medical Services Act, is the goal for health and medical care in Sweden?

To enable students to develop their thoughts on this and demonstrate that they have understood the meaning of the opening clause, the question could instead be put like this:

• According to the opening clause of the Health and Medical Services Act, the goal for health and medical care in Sweden is “good health as well as medical care on equal terms for the whole population”. The clause also says “Health and medical care is to be provided with respect for the equal value of all people and with respect for the dignity of the individual. Whoever has the greatest need for health and medical care is to be given priority to health and medical services”. Select a care situation, describe it and explain in what way the opening clause of the Health and Medical Services Act is effected in practice.

Here, students are forced to reflect on what the opening clause may mean in a concrete care situation. In addition, the fact that they themselves get to decide which care situation they want to base their answer on means that they can make use of their knowledge and experiences and are given scope for their creativity.

Making questions more complex

A third way of adapting a question for a remote online examination, is to make it more complex and bring in perspectives or circumstances that students have to consider in their answers. This may involve sharpening the question somewhat, so that students are forced to look at a practice or a phenomenon from a certain perspective.  Exams in an exam hall sometimes include questions such as:

• Compare the political implications of the French Revolution and the American Revolution.

A question of this kind easily generates answers where students simply list a number of consequences that they have identified in the course readings or made a note of during a lecture. If you want to encourage students to adopt a problem-oriented approach in the comparison, you can instead formulate the question like this:

• How would you explain the American Revolution’s political success and the French Revolution’s political failure even though both revolutions were based on the same philosophical principles?

In this question, students have been given a part of the answer – the American Revolution was a political success and the French revolution was a political failure – and their task is to compare and explain how the outcome could be so different when the principles for the two revolutions were the same. The questions is most likely more difficult for the students to answer, but above all, it requires them to demonstrate more in-depth knowledge.

Tips for choosing digital tools

Örebro University has several digital platforms for the examination of remote take-home exams and other remote take-home assignments. Read more about the different features offered by the different platforms below.

• Do you want to use audio and video in a take-home exam? Do you want to use interactive types of questions, such as drag-and-drop or questions with clickable pictures? Do you want to randomise the order of the questions and the order of the alternatives in multiple-choice questions?  See instructions on how to create  questions and exams and in FLOWmulti (The websites is in Swedish, but the videos on the site have subtitles in English)
• Do you want your students’ take-home exam to be submitted as a text document? Do you want to be able to make highlights and comment directly in the students’ texts? Do you want the students’ answers to automatically undergo a plagiarism check via Urkund? See instructions on how to create exams in FLOWassign (The websites is in Swedish, but the videos on the site have subtitles in English).