The Show Must Go On -- Examination During a Pandemic
This addresses the immediate need for universities to continue exams safely during a pandemic, but it is an incremental solution focused on a specific institutional context.
The paper tackled the challenge of conducting in-person exams during the COVID-19 pandemic while ensuring safety and efficiency, resulting in a framework that reduced office time and maintained data protection standards.
When unexpected incidents occur, new innovative and flexible solutions are required. If this event is something such radical and dramatic like the COVID-19 pandemic, these solutions must aim to guarantee as much normality as possible while protecting lives. After a moment of shock our university decided that the students have to be able to pursue their studies for guaranteeing a degree in the expected time since most of them faced immediate financial problems due to the loss of their student jobs. This implied, for us as teachers, that we had to reorganise not only the teaching methods from nearly one day to the next, but we also had to come up with an adjusted way of examinations which had to take place in person with pen and paper under strict hygiene rules. On the other hand the correction should avoid personal contacts. We developed a framework which allowed us to correct the digitalised exams safely at home while providing the high standards given by the general data protection regulation of our country. Moreover, the time spent in the offices could be reduced to a minimum thanks to automatically generated exam sheets, automatically re-digitalised and sorted worked-on exams.