Digital back to presence

The E-Exam Symposium format was launched in 2014 by RWTH Aachen University and has since been held in Paderborn, Bremen, and Siegen on a biennial rotation with Aachen. During the pandemic, two online conferences were held, so last year’s E-Exam Symposium (ePS) in Hamburg at the Technical University of Hamburg (until 2018, Technical University of Hamburg-Harburg) took place in person for the first time after a lengthy hiatus. The symposium, which has since established itself as the most important platform for exchange among e-learning experts, practitioners, and university administrators on all aspects of e-assessment, was held in 2022 under the theme “Digital Teaching, Learning, and Assessment in the Return to In-Person Instruction,” and the organizers, led by PD Dr. Christian Seifert, presented a diverse program featuring specialist lectures, poster presentations, and other formats for sharing experiences.

The E-Exam Symposium addressed the current challenges in the digitization of higher education teaching and assessment, as well as strategies for overcoming them. The focus was on the developments and transformation processes brought about by the pandemic. With the return to in-person instruction at many universities on the horizon, it is now important to determine which of the tools developed during the pandemic can be effectively utilized for the meaningful digitization of teaching. The 2022 E-Exam Symposium focused on various exam formats and presented a wide range of good practices and concepts for the future of digital teaching, e-assessment, and digital exams.

Our university was represented by Dr.-Ing. Sebastian Herrmann (Faculty of Mechanical Engineering, Department of Technical Thermodynamics) and Ronny Freudenreich, M.A. (Faculty of Mechanical Engineering and Centre for Knowledge Transfer and Education), who presented a concept for an in-person invigilated (written) examination with partial electronic grading using students’ own mobile devices— a combination of a paper-based examination and e-assessment for smart exam administration. Under this procedure, students taking the in-person exam (on campus) first complete the exam questions on paper and then enter their answers into an online testing system via their own internet-enabled device, following a competency-based assessment framework. This procedure is also known in professional circles as “bring your own device.” The results are evaluated automatically based on the answers entered into the online testing system, combined with a needs-based manual review of the solutions worked out on paper. The “hybrid invigilated (written) examination” combines the advantages of electronic testing methods with those of traditional paper-based examinations and enables efficient testing even for the complex methodological and mathematical problems typical in STEM subjects.