The Assessment and Testing is located in University Center Building C, Suite 1200.

Over the past several years, the number of FSU students taking courses at a distance has been rising steadily.

The impact of this increase is felt across the board: Departments put greater emphasis on developing strategies for teaching online and FSU resources and infrastructure are being expanded to meet increasing needs for technical support. Office of Distance Learning offers increased telephone and electronic trouble-ticket support and is posting timely information on the Blackboard Support tab.

One major challenge of online education is ensuring its academic integrity. The University must ensure that all work for an online course is actually done by the student who is enrolled, including assignments and exams. High-stakes exams such as midterms and finals that typically account for 20% or more of the final grade are especially critical in this context. In order to ensure the security and integrity of these critical exams, instructors of online courses collaborate with the Assessment and Testing to have their high-stakes distance learning exams proctored in professional testing centers. In order to be able to manage an increasing number of proctored distance learning exams, CAT has been implementing electronic solutions that make the process more efficient and reduce errors and delays.

Proctor Qualification


Assessment and Testing has a distance exam proctoring qualification process to ensure that all available proctors meet the technical and procedural requirements to serve the needs of FSU distance students. For details, please see our Policy and Procedures for Approving Proctors.

Electronic Exam Formats


In the past, paper versions of exams were sent to the proctoring sites via courier services and returned to CAT for distribution to the instructors. This process was not only costly and resource intensive, but was also error prone and delayed the timely return of exams.

Two changes were made over the past semesters to improve this process:


1. All suitable exams were converted to be administered via the Blackboard exam engine


2. Those exams that were not compatible with the Blackboard exam engine are being transmitted in electronic format (e.g. PDF) to the proctors via a secure Blackboard organization and returned either via a Blackboard assignment or an email to the instructor.
   
   In most cases, students can type their answers into an MS Word document, but even in those cases where the student's hand-written responses or notes must be submitted, there are electronic solutions: Proctors can either scan in the student's responses and submit the resulting file, or - in rare cases - can submit the hand-written exam portions via fax directly to the instructor.

Online Proctor Designation Form


CAT recently implemented an online form that students use to indicate their proctor selection. This reduces the possibility of errors and speeds up the process.

For more information about proctored distance learning exams, please see Proctored Exams for Distance Learning Courses on this web site. For questions, please contact Anna Ledbetter (645-8747).

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