At the E-Examination Symposium 2022 at the TU Hamburg, possibilities for digital approaches to smart examination implementation were discussed.
The e-exam symposium format was initiated by RWTH Aachen University in 2014 and has already been held in Paderborn, Bremen and Siegen, alternating with Aachen every two years. Two online conferences were held during the pandemic, meaning that last year's E-Prüfungs-Symposium (ePS) in Hamburg at the TU Hamburg (until 2018 TU Hamburg-Harburg) was held in person again for the first time after a long break. The symposium, which has now established itself as the most important exchange platform for e-learning experts, practitioners and university managers on all aspects of e-assessment, was held in 2022 under the motto "Digital teaching, learning and testing in the return to face-to-face teaching" and the organizers around PD Dr. Christian Seifert presented a varied program with specialist lectures, poster presentations and other formats for exchanging experiences.
The e-examination symposium addressed the current challenges in the digitalization of university teaching and examinations and how to overcome them. The focus was on the further developments and change processes caused by the pandemic situation. In view of the return to face-to-face teaching at many universities, it is currently necessary to clarify which of the tools developed during the pandemic can be used to digitize teaching in a meaningful way. The E-Examination Symposium 2022 focused on various examination formats and presented a variety of good examples and concepts for the future of digital teaching, e-assessment and digital examinations.
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 Center for Knowledge Transfer and Education), who presented a concept for a face-to-face exam with partial electronic evaluation using their own mobile device - a combination of paper-based exams and e-assessment for smart exam execution. The procedure involves learners first completing the exam tasks on paper in the face-to-face exam (on campus) and then entering their results into an online test system via their own internet-enabled device in accordance with a competency-based questionnaire. This procedure is also known as "bring your own device" among experts. The results are evaluated automatically using the solutions recorded in the online test system in combination with manual correction of the solutions worked out on paper as required. The "hybrid exam" combines the advantages of electronic testing procedures with those of conventional paper exams and enables efficient testing, even in the case of the methodical mathematical complex tasks typical in STEM subjects.
