Managing Online Exams during COVID-19 Outbreak: Experience of the Centre for Quality of Assessment& Examinations (QA Centre)

The current COVID-19 pandemic impacts on all aspects of human life including education. As a response, a growing number of higher educational institutions worldwide partially or fully shut down their campuses as a measure to contain the rapid spread of COVID-19 virus. Reports highlighted that around 1.57 billion children and youth - 90% of the world’s student population were affected by the lockdown (Co-operation & Development, 2020). Accordingly, governments rapidly deployed measures to transition courses and programs from face-to-face instruction to online delivery mode (Sahu, 2020), namely, to the usage of fully remote teaching, though there were varieties amongst institutions with regard to scope, intensity, methods (Rahim, 2020) and preparedness to face the new challenges. One of most challenging areas that required faculty to cope with was the design on online assessment and issuance of guidance (Rahim, 2020).