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Digital exam period at the Faculty of Pharmacy (Part 2): Experiences and useful advices from the Department of Pharmaceutics

24 June 2020

The exam period is also a kind of struggle for students. It is a struggle for an eternally valuable professional knowledge, a set of knowledge that can always be used and no one can take it. And the fight is gaining even more meaning in the context of what is happening in 2020. The fight against the coronavirus and the adaptation to it has become the main task and goal of the world, so in addition to certain areas of the market, education, as well as the education of researcher and teacher replacement, could not be stopped. The online exam period has developed a new but well-functioning higher education accountability system as a dowry of absentee digital education. In our current article series, we aim to present the experiences, useful and constructive advices of the departments of the Faculty of Pharmacy related to the online examination period, as well as the results of the implementation of the examinations. In our previous article you could read about the experiences of the Department of Pharmacology, and in this section we summarize the experiences of the Department of Pharmaceutics.

The Unipoll system passed the online exams

The Department of Pharmaceutics already had previous experience with the Unipoll system, which knowledge made it somewhat easier to apply the program during the online exam period. The Institute emphasized that the online tests and tasks of the system can be used well in distance education as well. In the case of compulsory subjects, students wrote a semester-final test in the last week of the term-time, on the basis of which they could obtain a offered grade. As a result, many students were able to obtain grades prior to the exam period.

The time interval for answering the questions had to be increased

Each of the semester-final test was a written examination. In the case of the compulsory subject called Pharmaceutical Practice and Management 2., when writing the first online test, a test question was given for 30 seconds, as a result of which none of the students was able to achieve a 60.1% (satisfactory) result. After that, the time interval was changed, so for a test question min. 45 seconds (in many cases, especially if the question contains categorization and several items to be categorized) were then available. The test was successfully completed under the modified conditions (> 80%). The weaker result in the first round is probably also due to the fact that the subject was characterized by essay-type questions prior to distance learning. However, the online exams consisted primarily of single, multiple choice, and categorization questions. The exams also revealed that English-speaking students had a harder time interpreting the test questions than the essay questions in the previous semester, while Hungarian students were better able to adapt to the new examination system.

Cheating on exams and technical problems

The question and topic of exam-cheatings have already appeared in the previous article, but only as the professor's fear. However, the Department of Pharmaceutics draws attention with a concrete example of how difficult it is in practice to prevent and eliminate exam-cheatings in spite of previously issued university and faculty guidelines. For example, the Institute considers the surprisingly better result in Pharmaceutical Knowledge subjects 1 and 3 to be one of the signs of cheating, than that observed in connection with Pharmaceutical Practice and Management subject 2. While the average of the grades obtained from the former was 4.14 and 4.5 (89 people successfully completed, of which 30 people obtained better than unsatisfactory grades through repairs), the same number for the latter was 2.6 (12 people). The Institute highlights as a huge positive and advantage of Unipoll that exam numbers for different days can be retrieved and that exam dates can be planned. With a large number of students, 2 of the 115 students at the Institute had a technical problem that could be related to the Unipoll interface and justified rewriting the exam at another time (first week of the exam period). “Improvements to date have been of great help to both faculty and students, but further improvements are needed in the Neptun and Unipoll systems to make examinations smoother later on. This also requires such data collection as well as further consultations with the Student Union ”