2024 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

In the U.S., enrollments across engineering disciplines continue to grow as colleges and universities work to respond to projected critical shortages of engineers. With these larger enrollments, institutions are faced with the challenge of maintaining academic rigor at scale. In particular, as course enrollments grow, institutions struggle to be able to adequately implement pedagogically sound assessment practices with the limited resources available to them.

This paper details how the implementation of asynchronous exams through the use of a Computer-Based Testing Facility (CBTF) at a large, land-grant institution has provided a means for not only assessing students at scale, but also afforded faculty the opportunity to integrate research-based assessment practices. This paper draws from 9 years of experience operating the CBTF, during which the facility has grown from serving 2 courses to 54 and to administering over 100,000 exams per semester. We first discuss the pedagogical benefits made possible through operating the CBTF. Next, we outline operational changes of the CBTF. Finally, we discuss the next stages in the development of the CBTF.

Prior works have documented the pedagogical and economic benefits derived from the CBTF, including opportunities to enact research-based mastery-learning assessment practices, offer retake exams, provide flexibility in student scheduling, and overall reduce the resources needed by course staff to administer exams. In this paper we build on this prior work, discussing developments related to second-chance exams and exam review practices, student scheduling preferences, and the optimization of lab operations.

We next discuss CBTF administration, focusing on how lab policies and procedures have evolved over the course of eight years. Specifically, we detail how the growth of the CBTF has influenced the staffing structure and also the training needs of both full-time staff and undergraduate and graduate proctors. Similarly, to better accommodate more exams, the CBTF has had to adapt scheduling policies as well as physical and technological setups. Finally, we discuss changes to student facing policies, addressing exam security and academic integrity protocols and steps taken to better accommodate students, especially the ones who require testing accommodations. For each of these topics, we demonstrate how current practices have evolved over time and why these practices provide the optimal conditions for providing a secure and comfortable testing environment.

Finally, we look to the next stages in the development of the CBTF. In this section, we discuss the need to develop more resources for onboarding faculty as well as working with experienced faculty to revise their assessment practices. We also outline the need to develop operational guides as resources to peer institutions who are working to implement their own CBTFs and the importance of being proactive in building a consortium amongst universities to build a community of practice focused on CBTFs.

In sharing our experiences from the past eight years of operating a CBTF at scale, we aim to provide a model to other institutions about how they can begin the process of developing their own similar programs.