“I can’t trust courses with online exams.”
“Google will now create answers for any test or assignment… This is the apocalypse for online courses. Even if you use a lockdown browser, students can use their phones to take a photo of the question and get an answer that way. There’s no way to make it go away.”
–Recent posts to the subreddit r/Professors
These professors—and many others—believe that only in-person tests can prevent apocalypse in online education. Is that a viable option? What would happen to online education?
Grades are supposed to provide information about how much a particular student has mastered the course skills. Grades serve many purposes, including feedback to students to help them learn. But the professors on Reddit seem concerned about the certification role of grades—providing accurate information to others about particular students’ skills. The “apocalypse” is that the combination of generative AI apps and online tests make it trivially easy to cheat—to get a grade corresponding to skills the student does not have. Implicitly, students want to cheat because grades have value separate from the students’ own capabilities. That belief—and the incentive to cheat—make sense, only if grades, directly or indirectly, have consequences, especially for jobs.
Each of these assumptions may or may not be true in particular contexts. It’s worth considering each of them. But in this post, I’ll assume they’re all true and explore the implications.
If security is the problem, security is the answer
AI and online assessment combine to create a wicked security problem. We cannot secure students in conditions that require them to do analysis themselves.
Several companies sell software to prevent cheating on online exams by blocking browsers, apps, and copy-paste functions. But these tools have gaps—and it’s an arms race. Tech will win, higher ed will lose.
Even in-person exams aren’t completely safe. Phones, Wi-Fi, and data are everywhere. Smartwatches and now smart glasses are tiny computers that can take photos, use AI, and communicate—making cheating easy. Keeping devices out takes time and effort, and while no-Wi-Fi locations help, in-person security is tougher and costlier than before. Still, it’s doable.
Will online students flee?
Students choose online education to avoid the time and cost of commuting, and asynchronous courses so they can work anytime, anywhere. Some are in the military, on call around the clock, caring for a baby alone, or traveling for work. That’s true for many of my professional master’s students—and for plenty of “nontraditional” undergraduates. For them, it’s asynchronous online learning or no education at all.
Requiring online students to take in-person exams will drive some to other programs without that requirement. Many colleges can’t afford to lose those students. And limiting access undermines the mission of schools like mine to expand opportunity. Colleges have reasons to no longer let faculty “require students come to campus to take a proctored midterm and final exam.”
Infrequent tests are the answer
There are ways to make in-person tests less disruptive for online students. Use satellite sites. Make tests available at multiple times. But these take extra time and effort from faculty and staff, and some money.
And they only chip away at major barriers. The only real fix is fewer tests. Infrequency is the answer.
How to do that? Skip midterms, of course. Cram multiple finals into one long day—or one day a year? Combine many courses into a single holistic exam? That has real advantages. But I doubt those tradition-minded professors on Reddit imagined the loss of autonomy—or the extra work.
High stakes are essential
Grades have stakes only when they affect something that matters to students. When employers use grades to make hiring or pay decisions, the stakes are high. More often, the stakes are indirect—if degrees are required for a job. If students cheat, they must believe grades matter in some way.
Whatever the stakes, fewer exams mean each one matters more. If exams must be infrequent, they must also be high-stakes.
High-stakes tests have fallen out of favor, at least in some quarters. A literature review found that in higher education, such tests don’t improve learning but do lower intrinsic motivation, increase stress, and worsen equity. At minimum, higher stakes will be a tough adjustment for some students.
I believe the best solution is to have exams given by independent bodies. Some US professional organizations, especially in medicine, already do this. Some countries use this approach at various levels. Colleges could also hold their own in-person, high security, infrequent, high stakes exams.
No real answer, just tradeoffs
In-person, high security, infrequent, high stakes exams can resurrect valid grading in online education—prevent the apocalypse. But they bring substantial costs in time, disruption, stress, and direct expenditures to online students, faculty, and colleges. There are no obvious choices, just tradeoffs.
For some subjects, some levels, and some student populations, in-person, high security, infrequent, high stakes exams are likely the best option. For others, maybe we can develop other ways to preserve the certification value of grades. For yet others, the certification value of grades may not be worth preserving.
All this means higher education will change substantially in structure—and the ways it changes will vary across subjects, levels, populations, and more. To prepare for the onslaught we need to understand the forces.