Provide a practice exam experience

One of the best things you can do to help students feel prepared for their exam is to create a quick practice experience so that they can see how the situation will work. This way they will be able to focus on their knowledge of the content rather than being concerned about how things will run on the day. This will also provide the opportunity for them to test their technical set-up to make sure that they have everything organised. Ultimately this simple action will help students feel more comfortable in this new assessment space and assist to ensure satisfaction with the course as a whole.

AI proctored exams

As these exams will be managed through the ProctorU platform, a short practice exam will be scheduled in advance by the Exams team as part of the overall ProctorU experience. This managed experience will provide the opportunity for students to test their technical set-up and experience what it feels like to use this external software. It will also allow them to understand the requirements around the physical space that they will be taking the test in, so that they are aware of the requirements for the day.

Any LMS-based quiz that you prepare for students to practice content-specific questions will be seperate from the ProctorU practice exam.

Timed LMS and Take-home exams

These exam types are undertaken within in the LMS, which students are hopefully familiar with. However as this may be a new assessment situation it maybe valuable to give them a chance to have a practical run-through.

The practice exam you create will be dependent on whether your assessment will take the form of a quiz or a take-home exam. This practice shouldn’t take students more than 10 minutes to complete in total.

Quizzes

To prepare students for an exam that will take the form of a quiz it is recommended to set up a practice quiz that you recommend they complete in the run-up to the real exam.The practice quiz must not use the ProctorU platform – even if the real exam is an AI Invigilated exam.

Elements to focus on:

• The test window – Set up and communicate the exam window and time limit. Make sure that students understand the way that they have a set time bracket within a wider window to complete the exam.
• The availability of external resources – Communicate clearly how you expect them to relate to external materials.
• The overall instructions for the experience – Are there any other elements tied to your particular exam/content that are could be drawn out here?

Take-home exams

To prepare students for an exam that will take the form of a take-home exam it is recommended to set up a practice submission.

Elements to focus on:

• The exam window – Set up and communicate the exam window and time limit. Make sure that students understand the way that they have a suggested time within a wider window to complete the exam.
• Submission types – What content file/files are you looking for as a submission? What file types are acceptable?
• The upload process – How you expect the materials to be labeled and submitted? Do they need to be compressed/have their format altered if particular forms of media are required?

Practice content

You will also need some questions to feature in your quiz or as your take home test. While you can develop a few amusing questions for students to answer there is also an opportunity to tie this back to the wider learning experience.

You may consider asking:

• Questions about the subject learning objectives  – Can they select them correctly? Can they define why they are important?
• The time and conditions of the exam – When will it be held? How long do they have to do it?
• Questions about exam preparation – What are the best ways to prepare?

Regardless of the questions you chose to include, make the response format match what you are anticipating (ie, text answer, text with visual assets).

Reviewing the practice materials

While there is no need to mark the quality of the responses you receive from the practice exam, it is extremely worthwhile to briefly review the materials submitted/sent in by students to make sure that there are not any clear submission/formatting errors. Any fundamental issues should hopefully stand out clearly and thus you have the opportunity to feed back any common or critical issues to the cohort before they embark on the final exam.

Additionally, this will allow you to verify that your exam system is working in the way that you intended, and make any final adjustments for clarity.