Combining Take-Home and In-Person Exams to Improbe Student Performance and Improve Instructor Grading Efficiency

This paper presents a methodology to evaluate students' performance by combining take-home exams with in-person exams.In-person exams are usually timed, closed-book exams that are stressful for students.Take-home exams give students more flexibility and a less stressful exam experience, however, these exams are problematic since they offer students an easier opportunity to collaborate with other students.In order to minimize the temptation to collaborate with others, the instructor in this study combined a take-home exam with an in-person exam.Students were aware that they were not allowed to collaborate during the take-home exam, and that there would be an in-class assessment where they must demonstrate that they understand the material on the take-home exam by answering similar questions.Results of this study show that this method increases students' overall performance in the exams.This methodology also reduces the number of exam collaborations in the take-home exams, and this method can be applied to both programming classes and traditional lecture classes.