Invigilating remote exams with Google Meet – a brief workflow

As we all try and get to grips with how to work remotely, one of the biggest potential challenges I’ve come across, so far, is where an assessment still needs to be completed under exam conditions. How do we achieve that easily in the age of remote learning?

Obviously, the first question that needs to be asked is, does the assessment really have to be carried out under exam conditions? Could it be rewritten into a format that’s easier to administer in these circumstances? But if it does need to be completed under closed-book exam conditions, there is a possible solution to that problem, using Google Meet and Classroom. Please be aware that some of the features mentioned are Enterprise features which are temporarily being made available to all GSuite for Education customers until July 1st 2020. After this date, you may have to use an Enterprise account to follow this workflow.

For this method to work, you need:
– to be in an organisation that has GSuite for Education.
– to have a suitable Classroom set up which your examinees have already joined and know will be used for the exam (don’t try and get them to join a new one at the point of sitting the exam, that will just get messy).
– for your examinees to be using a laptop or Chromebook with a working microphone, webcam and wifi connection.

Okay. If you’ve those ingredients in place, here’s the method:

1. Google Meet has the awesome ability to allow you to be in multiple Meets at the same time. This can be leveraged by creating an individual Meet for each examinee. [edit: some people have told me that they can’t do this in Meet. I don’t know why that would be the case, but obviously please check this method works for you before you rely on it!]

Like in a real exam, I would allow plenty of time before the exam start time to get each person set up into their own Meet with you.

[edit: 1.5 The awesome Paul Farrell has suggested naming each Meet with the examinee’s name. That way you can hover your mouse over each tab to see who’s in each Meet, and the recorded video will be pre-named for you later.]

2. Set each Meet to record.

3. Ask each examinee to present their entire screen with you and leave their webcam and microphone on for the whole time.

4. Once you have given any final instructions to them, go through and turn off your webcam and mute your microphone in every Meet so that you can’t distract any of them accidentally.

5. Post the exam as an Assignment on Google Classroom (if you’re asking for a Doc to be submitted you could turn on Originality reports for added plagiarism checking). Personally, I would have this ready as a draft, but would post it manually rather than scheduling in advance, in case there are technical difficulties with one or two people which cause a delay. Once you’ve posted it, you can go back into the assignment and change the due date and time as being the appropriate length of time after the posting time. If you have any examinees who need extra time, remove their names from the checklist of students in the first assignment, and create a new, separate, assignment just for them that can have the extended time (it’s a bit of a faff, but you don’t want them to panic seeing that their work was ‘handed in late’ when it wasn’t).

6. Invigilate the exam by flicking through the different Meets every so often and listening out for your name being called. Ask the examinees to call your name and then their name if they need help (so you can find the right Meet!). None of the other examinees will hear them, and you can unmute your mic for that specific person in their Meet to have a private conversation.

7. When the examinee has finished, they submit their work on Classroom and tell you that they’ve finished. When you have confirmed receipt of the work on Classroom they can leave that Meet. This confirmation step is useful in case you have someone who doesn’t understand the importance of hitting ‘hand in’, I’ve had many students tell me they’ve submitted something when they haven’t! A copy of the recording will automatically be saved to the ‘Meet recordings’ folder on your Google Drive and emailed to you, although there will be a delay of about 5 minutes before that happens as the recording is processed.

8. If you have any suspicions about the authenticity of the work produced you can review the full recording. The presented screen will allow you to find the part of the exam you wish to check, see their pattern of typing and what is on their computer screen; the webcam will show you if they are interacting with anyone else in the room, or with another device (watch if their eyes are moving from a normal position when typing to something off-screen for any period of time); and the microphone will allow you to hear if anyone else is in the room talking to them.

Granted it’s not a perfect solution, but I hope this has been helpful to anyone finding themselves in this position!