Manawatu Standard

Student worked for weeks for Massey

Some Massey University students affected by this week's online exam failures fear missing out on their assessment­s all together, while others are facing a re-sit.

The university's online exam system ran into technical problems from Monday to Wednesday, leaving students panicked and distressed.

Now, a petition has been launched to ditch the online system altogether.

On Monday afternoon the man who launched that petition, Alex Murray, headed into Massey University's Palmerston North campus to sit an online accounting exam.

He lives rurally so his internet is not reliable enough for the requiremen­ts of Massey's online supervised exams, known as OSEs.

"I had to book a room in the library to be able to sit it. I sat there for three hours trying to get into the exam, which I couldn't, and I gave up because I couldn't handle the stress," Murray said.

‘‘I went back the next day at 8am for another two hours and I could not complete the exam.’’

Murray said he encountere­d a range of error messages and problems.

On Wednesday the university cancelled the online supervised exams – where software monitors students via webcams - for the rest of the semester and has now reverted to online exams without monitoring.

It also extended the timeframe in which exams affected by the problems could be sat, but Murray said he could not fit his in before it closed on Thursday afternoon, after his previous attempts to log on didn't work.

‘‘I’ve also got a take-home exam to sit by tomorrow. That's my plan for this afternoon," he said on Thursday morning.

‘‘I’ve got meetings so I can't sit the [accountanc­y] exam. It closed at 2.30pm. It's not enough time for students to be able to re-jig their schedules.’’ He would apply for an impaired performanc­e grade or aegrotat pass.

‘‘The exam was worth 50 percent of my grade. I really wanted to sit it. I had been studying for weeks trying to build up to this point so I felt like I couldn't unleash my potential."

Murray's online petition at change.org calls on Massey to stop using online supervised exams. It has attracted more than 1000 signatures. He wanted to discuss this with Massey senior management.

‘‘Ever since the OSEs were launched there's been massive backlash with privacy concerns - students feeling uncomforta­ble that they have to show their bedrooms.

‘‘[For] the software they have to upload a room scan. This consists of panning the camera round to show underneath their desks, their walls, their ceilings - basically a 360-[degree] room view.

‘‘They have to pull up their sleeves to show their wrists to make sure they haven’t written any notes.’’

Exam performanc­e 'impeded'

Auckland distance student Stas Chalaev said he took almost three hours to log on to his accounting exam on Monday, and was initially worried he had done something wrong.

‘‘Mentally, I wasn’t feeling the best at 5pm as opposed to 2.30. I did prepare quite a bit for this exam. I felt I did all right, but I ended up missing the last question - 10 marks worth out of 100."

Because of that Chalaev might re-sit the exam, despite having to fit it in around work.

‘‘It’s something I'm considerin­g doing because even though I felt confident going into the exam my performanc­e, I felt, was a bit impeded because of that lag." He also raised issues of fairness if some students sat exams as open book tests, with no monitoring, while others didn't.

'This isn't an isolated incident'

Te Tira Ahu Pae student associatio­n distance vice president Flynn O'Hallahan said the short-term fix of halting online supervised exams was good.

But, students were still working through problems, such as rescheduli­ng, and it was not yet clear exactly how many were affected. The colleges of business and science mostly used online supervised exams, and they had 9500 students, so it could be a high number, he said.

The university now had to look to the future. ‘‘We're calling for them to re-evaluate how many courses are using their OSEs, which are more supervised, as opposed to the TCA [time-constraine­d assessment]-style of examinatio­n, which is more open book.

‘‘We’re calling for in-person exams to be returned as an option alongside OSEs, and different software for OSEs.’’

The associatio­n has had students tell it they want to change universiti­es because of online supervised exams, while others feel stuck as they were unable to change, O'Hallahan said.

‘‘This isn't an isolated incident. We've been approachin­g Massey for the past year over our concerns with OSEs, because there have been technical issues in the past.

‘‘This is the most extensive issue, but we've been warning things like this could happen and we haven't really been taken seriously, and now we're seeing the result of that.’’