The Show Must Go On -- Examination During a Pandemic

TL;DR

This paper presents a framework for conducting and correcting exams during a pandemic, ensuring safety, data protection, and efficiency through digital solutions and automation.

Contribution

It introduces a novel framework for safe, GDPR-compliant exam correction and management during emergencies like COVID-19, combining automation and digitalization.

Findings

Automated exam sheet generation reduces manual workload.

Secure digital correction process ensures data privacy.

Framework maintains exam integrity under pandemic constraints.

Abstract

When unexpected incidents occur, new innovative and flexible solutions are required. If this event is something such radical and dramatic like the COVID-19 pandemic, these solutions must aim to guarantee as much normality as possible while protecting lives. After a moment of shock our university decided that the students have to be able to pursue their studies for guaranteeing a degree in the expected time since most of them faced immediate financial problems due to the loss of their student jobs. This implied, for us as teachers, that we had to reorganise not only the teaching methods from nearly one day to the next, but we also had to come up with an adjusted way of examinations which had to take place in person with pen and paper under strict hygiene rules. On the other hand the correction should avoid personal contacts. We developed a framework which allowed us to correct the digitalised exams safely at home while providing the high standards given by the general data protection regulation of our country. Moreover, the time spent in the offices could be reduced to a minimum thanks to automatically generated exam sheets, automatically re-digitalised and sorted worked-on exams.