Students' assessments & exams

In order to set up and organize exams remotely/online (e.g. final exam, credit exam, mandatory exam, concurrent or time-limited exams), please:

• Contact your faculty referee to receive an exam space on your faculty's Moodle Exam platform. You can use the same exam space for the mock exam as for the real exam. 

• Contact your faculty referee in order to be guided towards useful ressources  for remote/online exam preparation

• Refer to the "Suggestions and ways of transposing and transforming examination methods into remote test"

• Refer to the "Good practices & recommendations for the creation of online exams on Moodle" (in French)

• Please carry out a mock exam well in advance in all cases, in order to validate that the chosen scenario works perfectly from a technical and organisational point of view, and to allow students to become accustomed to the system

• Contact the e-assessment team for futher questions via the following email address: eassessment(at)unige.ch

General principles regarding online assessments 

• Conducting assessments and examinations remotely constitutes a central part of integrating e-Learning into a course or a programme.

• Various features of Moodle (notably Test and Assignment) are very useful for many formats (see online format suggestions below). Tutorials for using these features are also available.

• It is important to keep in mind that the education system is built on a constructive sequence of elements that together make up the structure of a course or programme:
  • first, the contents and objectives of the course and/or training programme (in relation to the training needs of the target audience in continuing education)
  • the learning objectives/outcomes of the course and/or programme
  • the teaching modalities/activities selected
  • the ways of assessing learning.

• The modalities of knowledge assessment also depend largely on the objectives sought: formative or summative evaluations.

• Conducting assessments and examinations does not guarantee absolute control over the conditions under which the exam is conducted (cheating/fraud, student ID checks, etc.)

• Absolute security is unrealistic, so trust must be paramount in the relationship with students. We recommend that students sign an honour pledge for online knowledge assessments.  This commitment will be validated on Moodle by all students.

• Failing any means of control, an open book and open web examination approach (access to all paper and web resources) constitutes another alternative. Oral exams and coursework assignments are relatively less exposed to this problem.

• Key measures to limit the risk of fraud and plagiarism:
  • asking students to sign an honour pledge
  • providing limited time to complete a given test
  • randomizing exam questions
  • making use of the www.compilatio.net tool to detect similarities and plagiarism.

Exams with more than 50 students in session

Approximately 250 exams with more than 50 students take place during the spring and fall exam sessions. The remote delivery of these types of exams presents particular IT and organizational challenges in terms of server capacity and the availability of IT support teams, requiring a balanced distribution of these exams over the sessions.

The issue of lack of control over the conditions under which the exams are conducted (see above) is even more acute for large-scale exams.