ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2023
Unproctored online exams provide meaningful assessment of student learning.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2023. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 7 papers.
What it found
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
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Who cites it
7 citing papers in PubMed.
- Effects of Proctoring on Online Intelligence Measurement: A Literature Overview and an Empirical Study.Journal of Intelligence · 2025Article
- In-lecture quizzes improve online learning for university and community college students.Communications psychology · 2025Article
- Can ChatGPT-4o Really Pass Medical Science Exams? A Pragmatic Analysis Using Novel Questions.Medical science educator · 2025Article
- Basque-Spanish Bilingual Aphasia: A Case-Study to Reveal Frequency-Based, Language-Agnostic Lexical Organization in Bilinguals.Neurobiology of language (Cambridge, Mass.) · 2025Article
- Examiner workload comparison: three structured oral examination formats for the European diploma in anaesthesiology and intensive care.Medical education online · 2024Article
- Reply to Newton: Missing the forest (correlation) for the trees (mean differences).Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2023Article
- The validity of unproctored online exams is undermined by cheating.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2023Article
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2 authors.
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No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
In the United States, the onset of COVID-19 triggered a nationwide lockdown, which forced many universities to move their primary assessments from invigilated in-person exams to unproctored online exams. This abrupt change occurred midway through the Spring 2020 semester, providing an unprecedented opportunity to investigate whether online exams can provide meaningful assessments of learning relative to in-person exams on a per-student basis. Here, we present data from nearly 2,000 students across 18 courses at a large Midwestern University. Using a meta-analytic approach in which we treated each course as a separate study, we showed that online exams produced scores that highly resembled those from in-person exams at an individual level despite the online exams being unproctored-as demonstrated by a robust correlation between online and in-person exam scores. Moreover, our data showed that cheating was either not widespread or ineffective at boosting scores, and the strong assessment value of online exams was observed regardless of the type of questions asked on the exam, the course level, academic discipline, or class size. We conclude that online exams, even when unproctored, are a viable assessment tool.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.