Thoughts on Online Assessment

Until my first year of university, I had never encountered a course that provided online assessment of the students work or tests. Although my high school was well off when it came to accessing technology (we had computers and programs to create yearbooks, etc.), the teachers never took advantage of online assessment (other than in computer class) to assess our learning. When I first encountered online assessment, I was not very fond of it. I have a bit of test writer’s anxiety, and the fact that I was being put into a completely different atmosphere and being tested a completely different way, well it flustered me to say the least. However, as the years have past, I have begun to get a little more comfortable with it but am still not very fond of it.

I believe that online assessment will become a very helpful and useful assessment style for teachers in the future but at this moment I do not believe that it is very practical. In the Designing online assessment of student learning article (Segrave & Rice, 2003) some of the advantages that are said to come with online assessment are: flexibility of assessment (who can do the assessing and what they can assess), quicker feedback (through automatic marking and on-screen feedback comments after tests), and more effective assessment (in regards to better integration of assessment throughout the course and being able to assess more from what has been taught).

Even though these are great advances for assessment in general, there are still many problems with the style of assessing.

Some reasons that Segrave and Rice (2003) put forth in their article and also why I believe that society is not yet ready for this type of assessment is because of the problems in relation to: authentication, fraud, security, logistics, high monetary costs and system reliability. As well, I believe that this type of assessment does not take into account the level of it’s disruption to those who have test writers anxiety.

Schools who use online assessment are looking into most of these problems and have taken steps to ensure that online assessment is being used properly (such as having back up labs for times of overflow and making sure that students have their student ID cards with them when they come in to take a test to verify that they are who they say they are) however, it seems that they don’t take much into account when it comes to the troubles that individuals could face when suddenly they are having to deal with changes in the way they learn and the environments they feel comfortable with.

When it comes to my test writers anxiety, I find that online assessment makes it worse because there are: no fixed locations (which means no familiarity with where you do your online assessment to where you learnt the material), fixed time limit (often represented as a countdown on a corner of your screen which tends to distract from the task at hand and add pressure), and different sounds in these environments (i.e. the clicking of keyboards, music from tests, clicking of mice, humming of the computers, squeaks of rolling chairs), and less personal initiative (finding time and motivation to get to the labs and do the tests in a timely manner).