At my last teaching position, we required students to find a proctor to oversee their online exams. The proctor had to be a professional (say, a librarian or a teacher at an accredited school), and the student needed to submit their proctors' information to us in advance of the exam so that we had time to verify their proctors' identities--there were the occasional sketchy proctor situations before we tightened the proctor regulations). The students had no access to their exams unless we HAD confirmed proctor information, so compliance was pretty good. It cut down on our worries about cheating, and if there were truly technical difficulties during an exam, the proctor was on hand as a witness. University/college testing centres had the best proctors, as they were often familiar with online exams. High schools and public libraries sometimes had trouble, because their firewalls seemed to interfere with our online security measures.
We had a full-length trial exam for students and proctors to use in order to test their system requirements, and *begged begged begged* them to test their systems well in advance! If the real exam froze anyways and wouldn't submit, we would have the students write down answers onto paper, so that the proctor could fax them over. That might help for some glitches.
We also gave a bit more time for the online exam than the paper version, in order to allow for the oddity of scrolling through exam questions instead of flipping back and forth through pages, to allow for 2-finger typing on essay questions, and because students actually have to save and submit before the clock runs out. We didn't advertise this difference in time, but we explained it if students writing paper exams asked about it. Nobody complained about the extra time.
Our averages between paper versions and online versions were pretty similar.
Anyways.... a few things that have worked for us!
Thank you. This makes a lot of sense!
