Online exam reviews
How can you organise exam reviews online? Marlies van Beek shares her ideas.
According to the UU standards and the Education Examination Regulations (EER) students have a right to review their exam. The objective of an exam review is to facilitate formative learning; to give students the opportunity to see which mistakes they made on the exam taken, in order to learn from it and/or to be able to prepare for a resit, if applicable. Ideally, a relation is offered by the lecturer between the questions on the exam (or aspects of the assignment) and the learning outcomes. In this way students can not only conclude what they did not get or do right, but also, what needs to be studied/practiced further.
When choosing a method it is important to realise the objective of the exam review: an opportunity for feedback for the student.
Course coordinators have the job to plan the review and inform the students about it. How the review takes place depends on the type of exam and what is workable for the lecturers. Currently there is no other option than offering an exam review online. Suggestions for an online exam review are stated below.
Before an online session:
- Share answers to open questions (an answer model and/or the rubric used) in Blackboard and give students the opportunity to discuss their answers in the online session.
- Prepare a presentation on the most common mistakes, relating to the material dealt with. You could also include which questions were well answered by the great majority.
- Offer students to send their questions about the exam, with a clear deadline before the online session. This could be done by email to you or within Blackboard. Prepare the online session by discussing these questions and answers (preferably relating to the relevant learning outcomes and/or relevant classes on this subject). You could also choose to publish these frequently asked questions in an online document after the session.
During the online session:
- For any online session it is advised to be very clear about the objective and the way you would like to moderate it (e.g. using the chat, when camera off/on, when microphone off/on). Also, be clear about what the session does not include (e.g. the possibility to discuss about individual answers given and individually received scores/final mark).
- Students can ask questions in the chat (you could ask a colleague to act as moderator).
- You could organise break-out rooms per class/lecturer, to give the students the opportunity to talk to their own lecturer.
- Sometimes students want to see how their grade was calculated or students may want to compare their own answers with the correct answers to see if the grading has been done correctly. Then you will have to show them the exam that they have submitted. You could tell the student that a PDF / photograph of the exam will need to be made and therefore the student will have to send an email to you to make a separate appointment with you.
- Sometimes students want to see how an assignment (or group assignment) was graded. Also here you have to show them the submitted product. You could tell the student the same as above: that a PDF / photograph of the exam will need to be made and that therefore the student will have to send an email to make a separate appointment with you.
- In case of separate appointments with students: try to give constructive feedback. Mentioning what is the current state in relation to the learning outcomes(feedback) and what needs to be done, which steps need to be taken (feedforward) to improve their performance.