Unisa strikes record on online exam after dreadful glitches
"Should it be necessary to move any more dates, students will be informed."
About 27 000 law students at Unisa successfully sat for an online examination last week Friday, the university said.
“Students from across the country logged onto the university’s online examination system,” said Philip van der Merwe, of the university’s institutional advancement department.
Many of the students used devices issued by the National Student Financial Aid Scheme (Nsfas) and with data provided by Unisa for the College of Law’s Introduction to Law paper.
Teaching, learning, community engagement and support acting vice-principal professor Veronica McKay spearheaded Unisa?s online examinations programme.McKay said the college had perfected the live monitoring of online examinations.
ALSO READ: Unisa apologises for online exam ‘glitches’
“Friday night’s session was completed within time and without major issues, and this is testimony to the hard, dedicated work put in by both the university and the college to deal with the unusual situation in which the Covid-19 pandemic has placed universities around the world.”
She said the session was unique in that Unisa had 27 000 students writing the same examination paper online at the same time, which was a technical feat of note.
Mckay said Unisa was able to achieve their success after attending to various issues that had created challenges for students when writing and submitting assignments’ online.
“We expanded the system, put in much more bandwidth and created a dedicated portal for each examination.”
She said students in this exam were able to call and email the lecturer responsible for the paper and the support team while writing.
“Members of the support team listened in on the conversation and read the emails in real-time, assisting Unisa to provide the best possible advice when issues were encountered.”
This comes as Unisa experienced glitches earlier in the month in other examination sessions, which led to students voicing their concerns online, on social media platforms, in emails and across other channels.
ALSO READ: Suspended Unisa strike to possibly resume
Unisa apologised to students who were affected by technical glitches while writing online exams as exams had also been rescheduled. Unisa explained that the Covid-19 pandemic had compelled it to reconsider some of its academic activities that require a physical application, such as venue-based examinations and the submission of hard copy assignments.
To spread the load on the examination platforms, it had been necessary to change the times of about seven out of 2 000 exams, said McKay.
“Should it be necessary to move any more dates, students will be informed,” McKay said.
Unisa said decisions to move exam dates were not taken lightly.
“They are made in the best interests of the students since we have needed to spread the load on the system,” McKay said.
Due to system problems, the exams that were due to start today, Thursday 11 June 2020, have been postponed to Saturday 20 June 2020. All the exams will be written at the same time, except for PVL1501, which will begin at 16:00 on Saturday 20 June 2020.
— Unisa (@unisa) June 11, 2020
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