Timing and Duration Considerations
There are two main timing parameters that need to be decided:
- Exam Availability: How long the exam is available for students to start
- Writing Time: How long students have to complete the exam once they have started
Exam Availability
A typical in-person exam is synchronous—the exam is only available for a short, fixed time-window, and all students are expected to complete the exam at that time. For online exams, it’s a good idea to build more flexibility in the exam availability time-window to account for variations in when students are available, conflicts with other responsibilities, and other accessibility considerations. For example, in an online class, students might be living in different time zones. This could result in some students having to write the exam at unconventional hours (e.g., in the middle of the night), which is a disadvantage to those students.
Instead of a synchronous exam, you might consider making your exam available:
- Anytime during a 12-, 24- or 48-hour time window. This allows students to complete the exam at a time that is most convenient for them.
- At several fixed time-windows instead of just one. This way you know exactly when students are completing the exam, but students will still be able to choose the time that works best for them.
Writing Time
Online exams tend to take longer to complete than in-person exams. This is because students need to navigate the technology (and potential technical difficulties). You can think of it this way: turning over a piece of paper to continue working on an exam usually takes far less time than clicking a continue button and loading a new webpage, especially for students with slower internet connectivity.
When deciding on how long students should have to complete the exam once they have started, add some time above and beyond how long it should take to answer the questions to account for these special circumstances.
Finally, if students have an accommodation that specifies they receive extra writing time for tests/exams (e.g., 1.5 time), this extra time must be added to whatever the students without this accommodation receive. This means that if you decide to extend the exam writing time for everyone, for example by adding 30 minutes across the board making the exam 2 hours long, students with extra writing time accommodations still receive writing time beyond the new time (e.g., 3 hours).