Tel Aviv University's success with online examination

By Admin

Mission

Enhance the student experience and save time for teachers and faculty.

Tel Aviv University

Tel Aviv University is Israel's largest and most comprehensive institution of higher learning. It is home to over 30,000 students studying in nine faculties and over 125 schools and departments across the spectrum of sciences, humanities, and the arts. Situated in Israel's cultural, commercial, and creative center, Tel Aviv University boasts a campus life as dynamic and diverse as the metropolis itself. The University is consistently ranked in the world's top 20 for scientific citations and among the top 100 universities internationally.

“Digiexam’s development strategy is focused on ease of use, and that works really well for us! It’s very easy to use, from the students to teachers to administrators, they all really like it!”

- Dr. Amit Pundik

The problem

Because many of the staff members are teaching in the US, the Law Faculty discovered different solutions to take exams digitally, so the faculty decided to transform the process of online exams and hopefully remove the pen and paper from the process. The Vision was to integrate a solution to enhance the student experience but also to make testing more efficient in the marking/grading process, both for teachers and teaching assistants, and to provide an easier and more transparent way of giving and receiving feedback.

Key findings

  • Law students can write exams fully digitally (most times during several hours) without any issues.
  • Digiexam will provide the security needed for secure and high-stakes exams with it’s industry-leading Lockdown functionality.
  • The teachers not only save time in the marking process. It’s also easier to co-mark with peers.

”The Customer service that Digiexam delivers is great. Every time we need something the response is very quick, also we got really good support during the pilot and the implementation process. We had Digexam staff coming over for training and hands-on workshops and gave us guidance”.

- Dr. Amit Pundik

The solution

The faculty did a lot of market research and Digiexam was one of very few that could meet the need. After a lot of internal discussions and testing of other internal systems the decision was made to implement Digiexam. To win the students over, during the early adoption phase, the students had the option to write either using the traditional methods (pen and paper) or to use Digiexam. Law students are relatively traditional, more conservative compared to other students, they had a 50/50 split in the groups. However, after the first exam period, most students moved over to writing their exams digitally. This is the only faculty in the country that runs digital examinations and tests. There’s been a lot of interest from the ministry of justice and other faculties from around Israel, so the faculty take pride in being brave to innovate and try new solutions to old problems.

Our experience is that Digiexam is a big success.

- Dr. Amit Pundik

The result

The experience is that Digiexam is a big success. and the student experience was very positive, Dr.Amit Pundik explains. Students even claim they get higher marks when writing digitally. The institution doesn’t know if it’s true, but Dr. Pundik believes that it might be true and that this is actually a good thing. Examiners are now able to understand every single word the students mean/write, and because students are able to edit what they mean/write,
together with the possibility to come back and reshaping the answers, they are able to exhibit their knowledge in a much more efficient way.

The examiner’s experience was up the sky, and they loved it. They could mark the exams from abroad, from a coffee house, also we save a lot of time on shipping exams, saving several days in a pressured environment where the faculty needs to hand in results very quickly. Also of course easier to read the answers, etc. On the examiners’ side, it was an even bigger success than for students, though the students are extremely happy too, Dr.Pundik says.

“On the examiners’ side, Digiexam was a much bigger success than for the students, though the students are extremely happy too.”

- Dr. Amit Pundik