E-exam adoption rising amid tampering, cheating

Many African universities are exploring the option of e-exams to cope with the assessment demands of rapidly growing student numbers, and rising incidents of grade tampering and cheating.

An e-exam is a timed and supervised assessment conducted using either candidates’ own computers running a standardised operating system or university computers, as against paper-based examinations.

The growing popularity of the concept of e-exams is evident in Egypt where Minister of Higher Education and Scientific Research Khaled Abdel Ghaffar recently called for the speeding up of the establishment of e-exam centres at universities approved by the Supreme Council of Universities, according to an Ahram news report.

“Recently, there are widespread increases in the adoption of e-exam systems in many African universities in Nigeria, South Africa, Morocco, Egypt and Uganda,” Shafi’i Muhammad Abdulhamid, head of department of cyber security science at the Nigerian Federal University of Technology school of information and communication technology, told University World News.

“The primary purpose of deploying e-exam systems is to increase the speed, security, integrity, veracity and reliability of the assessment,” Abdulhamid added.

Hurdles to cross

“However, there are still operational challenges facing African institutions to achieve the intended purpose, including system failures, impersonation and alteration of grades using the insider attack or man-in-the-middle,” he said.

Echoing these sentiments, Sulyman Age Abdulkareem, vice-chancellor of Nigeria’s University of Ilorin, told University World News “the challenges facing e-exams in African universities include the poor setting of the e-exam environment, poor networking of the universities’ e-exam centres and lack of resources to conduct e-exams”.

Older, traditional systems of examinations are showing their limitations, particularly in the developing world, Algerian higher education expert Abdelkader Djeflat, at the University of Lille, France, told University World News.

Traditional system limitations

He said “the traditional problems are often linked to too much human interference [and] the temptation of impersonation among students, but can go as far as bribe-taking by lecturers, invigilators and supervisors as well as examination leakages”.

“In addition to that, countries with large populations of students and the need to introduce a continuous assessment system find it difficult to implement the traditional system correctly,” Djeflat said.

Benefits of e-exams

“The use of e-exams simplifies the entire testing cycle, including generation, execution, evaluation, presentation and archiving,” Djeflat said. “This simplification saves time, money and effort as it drastically reduces workload while improving reliability and lowering the number of invigilators needed.”

“It is an effective solution for mass education evaluation, particularly in countries where large numbers of students take exams simultaneously, including Egypt which currently has about 2.5 million students in public, private and national universities,” Djeflat said.

Challenges and solutions

To make the e-exam system technically effective, Djeflat said several conditions are needed such as encryption to reduce human interference and immediate student access to results. As immediate student access to results is not always achieved, he said this could give rise to alteration of students’ results.

“As a potential solution, there should be adequate training and awareness for students and staff prior to the e-examination, a friendly software interface and the possibility to provide controlled environments for e-exams,” Djeflat said.

Algerian mathematician, Professor Sadallah Boubaker-Khaled, from École Normale Supérieure in Algiers, told University World News that despite “the advantages of e-exams in saving money, as well as achieving accuracy and justice, it is not suitable for final students’ examinations, but is suitable for preliminary screening”.

“In mathematics, for example, if you want to know how the students answer according to logical rules, this cannot be assessed by a machine. The same can be said for philosophy or literature when assessing the students’ ability in critical thinking, discussion and criticism,” Boubaker-Khaled said.

Way forward

“While the memory and recall strategies of traditional testing systems are no longer adequate to assess deep learning in university students and e-exams are not suitable for testing skills like synthesizing information, understanding evidence, and critical problem-solving; universities must start thinking about developing new performance-based assessments,” Hilmi Salem, an international higher education consultant, told University World News.

“This new proposed testing system could include paper-based, oral and e-exams along with other innovative and well-constructed assessments to measure what matters most for university students to be successful in the 21st century,” Salem said.