Administering assessments
Practical information and tips for hosting an assessment, including registration procedures, permitted aids, fraud prevention, surveillance and facilities for students with disabilities.
On this page
- Enrolling for an exam
- Study aids
- Fraud prevention
- Invigilation
- What to do if you suspect fraud or irregularities
- Facilities for students with a disability
Enrolling for an exam
Students have to use MyStudymap to enrol for exams, constituent exams and papers. No later than two days before the exam, the Education Administration Office will send you a list of participants, which you should check carefully. Any students who are not enrolled must be refused admission to the exam. If the assessment is in digital format, it will not be available to them in the system and they will not be able to participate.
For more information, see also:
Study aids
As the examiner, you decide whether students are permitted to use study aids in an assessment, such as literature, dictionaries, calculator and suchlike. Students and invigilators must know in advance precisely what study aids are permitted. If dictionaries are permitted, you must make clear whether these should be explanatory dictionaries or translation dictionaries, depending on the purpose of the exam. Communicate this information clearly and punctually in Brightspace and on the front page of the assessment itself.
Fraud prevention
When administering assessments, it’s important to prevent fraud (cheating). A few tips are given here:
- Specify clearly in advance what study aids are permitted. The use of a mobile phone is never permitted.
- Always arrange a sufficient number of active invigilators.
- Make sure that students can’t copy each other’s work by monitoring the distance between them and perhaps working with different versions of assessments (the same questions but with different numbering) and distributing them alternately.
- For more information, including on prevention of fraud and plagiarism in essays written at home and misuse of generative AI, see: Fraud and plagiarism.
Invigilation
Examiners are responsible for the invigilation during their own exams. If you’re unable to do this yourself, you should arrange for an alternative invigilator. For large exams, you can request additional invigilators online, if necessary in consultation with the education coordinator, until four weeks before the exam. The guideline is one invigilator per 50 students. When exams are held in the USC, you don’t need to request invigilators, as they are arranged by Timetabling Services.
Students with a disability may sometimes have special exam facilities, such as additional time. You should therefore always allow for a further half hour of invigilation after the official end time of the exam. More information about this can be found on the ‘facilities for students with a disability’ page.
See also:
- Teachers’ Handbook for the Faculty of Humanities – Appendix 3: Procedure for invigilation during exams
Invigilation (‘proctoring’) for remote digital assessment
Students can take digital assessments from home. Remote invigilation, in the form of ‘online proctoring’, is no longer facilitated by the faculty. However, there are various other options to reduce the risk of fraud:
- If possible, we advise you to design assessments in such a way that students are asked to apply knowledge, so that it’s not easy for them to just look up the answers. Open book assessments, for example, are especially suitable for remote exams.
- Alternatively, give students the option of taking the exam in groups. By asking students to talk to each other about the questions, you encourage them to discuss the course material. They can then formulate their own answers, based on that discussion with the other students, or they can all submit the same answers as a group (which can save you a lot of time on grading).
- Full screen mode: where students see only the exam and no other tabs or programs. However, this option is not infallible: in theory, students could have an extra monitor or laptop, or use their mobile phone.
Please note: full screen can’t be used for open book exams, because students are obviously permitted to use other programs for these. - Plagiarism check on open questions using Turnitin, which is integrated in Ans.
- Randomise the order of questions for each student, or create a question pool and give each student a random set from this.
- Impose a tight time limit, so that students don’t have much time to look up answers.
What to do if you suspect fraud or irregularities
Examiners are responsible for ensuring that order is maintained during their own exams. If an invigilator observes an irregularity, (suspected) fraud or disturbance during the exam or constituent exam, it must be reported immediately to the examiner.
A student who is suspected of fraud is always permitted to finish the exam, because excluding the student would be a sanction, and the right to impose sanctions is reserved by law to the Board of Examiners. The examiner informs the student that the exam will not be graded until the Board of Examiners has made a decision.
The examiner or invigilator may confiscate any items in the student’s possession that could be relevant in evaluating the irregularity or fraud. Instead of this, photocopies of items or notes in books, for example, can be given to the Board of Examiners. In all cases, the examiner can provide the Board of Examiners with an official report of the observed irregularity or fraud, signed by two examiners or invigilators, instead of confiscated items or the said photocopies.
A student can only be asked to leave the room in cases where that student causes serious disruption during the exam, and continues to do so after being given a warning.
For more information and guidelines, see:
- Chapter 6 of the Rules and Regulations (R&R) of the Boards of Examiners. A model form for the official report is attached to the R&R as Appendix 1.
Facilities for students with a disability
Students with a chronic illness or disability may apply to the Board of Examiners for special exam facilities. Some of the frequently granted facilities are: additional time (10 minutes extra per hour), use of a laptop, enlarged font, low-stimulus room or noise-reducing ear protection or earplugs.
About three days before the exam, the coordinator for studying with a (functional) disability (‘StuFu coordinator’) will send you a list with a summary of the facilities granted per student. You may occasionally be contacted earlier than this. In the case of digital assessments, the StuFu coordinator will also inform ECOLe.
Teachers should always allow for a further half hour of invigilation after the official end time of the exam.
For students who will take their exam in a low-stimulus room, the StuFu coordinator will ask the teacher for the exam about two weeks before the exam date (this can be slightly later if students enrolled later). You must send the exam by email no later than five working days before the exam date, so that the StuFu coordinator can prepare all the exams of the various courses on time. The StuFu coordinator organises the low-stimulus room. You can then collect the completed exam papers the day after the exam from the Student Information Desk in the Lipsius Building.
Students who are permitted to take their exam on a faculty laptop are also given a USB stick by the StuFu coordinator, together with the laptop. They will copy the completed exam to this and hand it to the invigilator or teacher at the end of the exam. If the student is in a StuFu room, the StuFu coordinator will email the completed exam to the teacher. You should print the completed exam yourself, before deleting it from the USB stick, which you can then return to the Student Information Desk.
StuFu students are not provided with a laptop for online exams, unless the regular exam is held in a computer room. No additional facilities are provided for online take-home exams.
It may occasionally happen that a student needs to take digital assessments on paper for medical reasons, such as epilepsy. In such cases, the StuFu coordinator will inform you as soon as possible that the exam will need to be printed.
For more information on exam facilities for students with a disability, see this webpage or send an email to the StuFu coordinator: osz-stufu@hum.leidenuniv.nl.