The Covid-19 pandemic has not diminished interest in higher education, quite the contrary. While less than 21,000 candidates took the National Comparative Exams last school year (2019/2020), which are used by more than 50 Czech and 30 Slovak faculties as part of their admission procedure, this was 22,630 this year.
This is roughly the same as the year before (2018/2019), when approximately 23,000 candidates took the exams. The main difference, however, was the form of exams, which had to be switched to an online form of examination on individual dates in spring of last year with regard to anti-epidemic measures. Due to the ongoing development of the epidemic, it was not possible to realise anything other than online exams again this year. In total, almost 23,000 participants from the Czech Republic, Slovakia and abroad took 61,018 online exams on six dates.
The highest priority for online exams, with which no one in the Czech Republic or Slovakia had had much prior experience (or indeed anyone in the world in the scope of tens of thousands of exams in the field of education), was to ensure the same fairness, transparency and security as in the case of in-person exams. Thus, organising such a large number of secure online exams posed a major challenge from a technical and organisational perspective. Tens of thousands of exams meant, among other things, tens of thousands of different computers with individual settings, as well as internet connections of varying quality. With such numbers, it was statistically virtually impossible to avoid technical difficulties, yet, with the exception of one major outage, there were no major technical problems in organising the NCE, which affected less than one percent of candidates on any one date. An exception was the aforementioned outage in February, which affected almost 8% of candidates. As a result, 98.48% of all exams were successfully completed. Scio organised alternative exam dates for candidates who did not complete the exam due to technical problems.
However, this does not mean that all exams were valid. Online exams were accompanied by strict control measures, and if participants broke the rules or cheated, their result was blocked and was not received by the university faculty. The final number of blocked results due to violations of exam rules was 3.47% of the total number of exams. "Although we encountered violations of the rules on all dates, this was not targeted cheating in most cases, but simply noncompliance with the rules of the exam," said Martin Drnek, NCE Project Manager. "Although exam participants were clearly and repeatedly acquainted with the conditions that had to be met, the most common offences against the rules of online exams included an incomplete scan of the room, unauthorised items such as a mobile phone or calculator near the participant, leaving the camera shot during the exam, wearing headphones or opening online help, such as a Google search or launching an online calculator,” added Drnek
Nevertheless, some participants tried to deliberately cheat, most often by "inconspicuously" searching for information on a mobile phone or with the help of another person in the room. "There were also participants who took the online exams in very unique ways. One student probably celebrated a bit more than he should the night before and fell asleep during the exam. Another participant saw the exam as a strip show. However, if they did not commit any other transgressions, this in itself would not be a reason to block their result. In any case, any participants who did not agree with their results being blocked, had the opportunity to appeal the decision," remarked Martin Drnek.
Assessing the legitimacy of tens of thousands of exams would be virtually impossible without the help of artificial intelligence software. This looked for disputable moments in records of the course of each exam, which were later assessed by live trained evaluators. Scio has used the experience gained in this way to develop its own proctoring system, ScioLink. This will oversee the course of online National Comparative Exams in the coming school year.
Scio
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