The procedure for administering online exams is provided below. Please print-out this important document for future reference. Please follow the procedure to the letter in so far as possible. 

We appreciate the fact that you are all professional educators. However, any serious deviation from the procedure below could have serious implications for the accreditation of the UMUC-Europe DE programs. Be mindful, too, that the procedure is written for the "lowest common denominator" of university teaching experience. 

1. Create at least two exams of equivalent scope and difficulty. The questions should be designed to elicit high level responses from your students. Make them think, not merely recognize or recall elemental information. Authentic (real world) problems and case study exercises make excellent questions for an open book, take-home exam. For security purposes, each time the course is offered, the exams must be revised and eventually recreated altogether.

   Please do NOT presume that you can trust students to honor a "closed book" exam specification. The temptation is simply too great to expect full compliance. To wit, multiple-choice, true-false, and other short answer type questions are not appropriate in most cases. 

2. By mutual agreement (or instructor decree!), designate a two-day window as the exam period, a 48-hour timeframe beginning at any hour and finishing at that same hour two days later. 

3. More than likely you will have one or more students who cannot take the exam during the 48-hour period you set. To protect the first administration of the exam from those not actually taking the exam, create an "Exam" study group and subscribe all the students who will take the exam on time to that group. A few minutes before the 48-hour window opens, post your exam in a conference of the "Exam" study group; only members of the group will be able to access the exam. A few minutes after the window closes, delete the exam from the conference. Use the same procedure for the group taking the make-up exam. [Tx to Michael Ofsowitz for this suggestion!]

4. Advise your students when the exam will be posted in WebTycho and which server you initially posted it on, tychousa1, etc. Students should retrieve a copy of the exam, answer the questions, and either (a) post the completed exam in their Assignments area of WebTycho -- no later than the close of the 48-hour exam window or (b) return it to you by e-mail. Although format (a) is preferred, you should be somewhat flexible in receiving the exam in one of these two formats. [As a protection against computer viruses, we recommend you accept assignments & e-mail attachments as either plain text or HTML documents only. Downloading word processor documents is very risky.] 

   Consider including a late submission policy by which the student loses points or a letter grade for every late day. Be sure to inlcude this in your syllabus and exam posting. Provided you are using WebTycho, the exam will have a valid date stamp making it difficult for the student to appeal. 

5. If a student is unable to access WebTycho and complete the exam, he/she should contact you immediately by phone, fax, and/or e-mail and request that the exam be sent to him/her by e-mail. 

6. Students who are unable to take the exam on the agreed upon date must notify you IN ADVANCE of the exam date. 

7. Students who do not take the exam on the agreed upon date must provide you with documented evidence of a duty, health, or other bona fide emergency. 

8. If necessary, set up a second 48-hour exam window for all students who are unable to take the exam during the first 48-hour window. Repeat steps 4 - 6 using the second version of your exam.

9. A student who fails to take the exam and does not notify you of his/her inability to do so may receive an F(n) for the course.

10. Send a copy of your exam(s) by e-mail to UMUC-Europe DE Exams <edde-exams@ed.umuc.edu> on or before the last day of class. Please inlcude your last name, term, and course in the subject line of your e-mail.

11. Your exam(s) will be reviewed by the appropriate Academic Director and filed in the DE Office.

IF AND ONLY IF the WebTycho servers are inoperative should the exam be sent by e-mail. In other words, please do NOT e-mail the exam unless absolutely necessary. 

Should the WebTycho servers fail, making it necessary to e-mail the exam to students, be sure to send it only to students scheduled to take the exam during the window. 

WebTycho currently has no provisions for recording the time an exam is accessed; however, student submissions to the Assignments area are date/time stamped.