IÉSEG is a school with two campuses in Lille and Paris, and approximately 6100 students, out of which 2,000 are international students. Students of approximately 100 different nationalities attend the school, spread over approximately 25 programmes. IÉSEG started using WISEflow in 2020. The following is an account by Jonas Debrulle, Director of Programmes at IÉSEG School of Management, who is responsible for all the school’s degree-seeking programmes.

Context

“I was relatively new in the job when coronavirus hit us: March was one of my first months. March is also when we were hit by a lockdown. We had exams coming up in May. Not doing the exams was never an option. Some of our students are looking for a job right now, in very difficult circumstances. Without their degree, they would not be able to be looking for a job. So, we needed to be sure they would finish their degrees on time. We could not afford to make mistakes. We had some exams that involved around 1,000 students and these could not go wrong – if they did, we’d have a major issue.

“The French government stipulated some rules under which we could or couldn’t do exams, one of which was that we needed to provide an identity check and be able to ensure that it was really the right student doing the exam. We needed some sort of visual proof. That created a bit of an issue for us, because the software we were using didn’t allow us to have any visual proof. On top of that, the platform we had in place was not widely shared amongst professors. Another issue was that we have almost 150 permanent professors but many more visiting professors. They normally provide the course, after which the exam is taken care of by our administrative staff and then graded by these visiting professors. So, we would, of course, have to include these professors in anything we did.

“We needed to find a new solution. We were in crisis mode. The management board met multiple times a week regarding day-to-day management of our School. The most important thing for us was to make sure that the current students were able to finish their degree under the best circumstances possible. So, a team of people was identified to scope the market and find out what examination solutions there were. We were looking both at national and international partners. We needed something where we could be sure of the identity of the person doing the exam, and of course we also wanted restrict cheating, so we needed a software that did not allow the use of other resources on the computer during the exam. We spoke with a couple of companies in the beginning of April; one of those was UNIwise. We’d heard about UNIwise through some partner institutions we have in the UK, because at this point, WISEflow wasn’t used in France by any school. We quickly set up a meeting and then it all went really, really fast. The second week of April, we met with all possible partners. We had follow-up meetings with three of them the week after.”

Implementing WISEflow

“Soon after, we decided to use WISEflow as a final decision. WISEflow is a very impressive software with facial comparison. In terms of the features that were there for professors, in terms of types of questions, autocorrection, volumes of people that could do an exam, it was all good. Between signing the contract and running the first exam, we had three to four weeks. In that time, we needed to first get acquainted with the software ourselves, educate all the professors, ensure students could do dummy exams, set up the exams, train all of the flow managers, and make sure that the proctors understood what to do. There was also that aspect of change management: making sure that people adopted the software. For us to do that in a short amount of time was probably the most challenging thing.

“So, several people from the school went through the training that UNIwise provides on WISEflow, including how to create exams, how to evaluate assignments and so on. I’d have to say that during this process, which was indeed quite quick – our exams were happening at the end of May – the UNIwise representatives we worked with were extremely responsive. The responsiveness of UNIwise’s Training & Consultancy team was super impressive. When I sent an email, whether weekday or weekend, we got a reply in a matter of hours. And I must admit, we sent a lot of emails! For us, this was pretty much a 24/7 process. We realised that we had to work through the weekends and nights, or it wouldn’t work, but that can only be done with a partner that is responsive – and because of that, we were able to fast-track quite a lot.

“Once we knew we had four weeks to make it work, we quickly realised we needed to provide a whole lot of training, because if we didn’t provide enough training to people who needed to set up the exams, the staff, the students – who needed to have experience with the software before they sat their exams – nothing could happen. We’d already started to mobilise the managers, the ones who were going to create the flows. We adapted our organisation to how WISEflow works. We usually don’t work with a separate role for managers, but we basically made sure that we were as close as possible to the way WISEflow works, without having to abandon the way we normally do exams. So, we asked our staff and the people that usually do the backend work of exams to engage in training in how to become a manager, and we also decided that they would supervise the exams. And the professor would take the author and marking role. We then organised five to six training sessions, each attended by approximately 20 to 30 people. Some of them took the training two or three times to make sure they understood. We invited them to engage as participants in each other’s’ exams to see what went wrong. After that, we briefed all the professors on how to create exams. The integration between Moodle and WISEflow was really helpful, because simple MCQ questions could be imported. Yet only few professors used online exams at that point, so this was new to a lot of them. We provided a lot of training and also did short videos about some FAQs. We also set up a panel that would be available for whatever questions professors might have. At the beginning, that panel was available in standard working hours, but it quickly evolved into very early morning and very late evening; they needed to be very responsive on their emails to make sure professors could make the necessary progress.

“While that was happening in the beginning of May, we couldn’t forget that we had to educate our students. Approximately 3,000 students needed to do exams in May and June. Students were asked to engage in several dummy exams. There were some students that did all five of them, and only very few students did none of them. Yet, those who did not do any mock-up exam were the ones we encountered problems with, usually because they ended up starting their exam late because they were not up to speed with the software. We also asked a group of 10 masters students to be our "guinea pigs" to test all different kinds of features of the software – they worked through close to 40 types of tests, so we could experiment with the different bells and whistles of what the software can do: what can students do in lockdown browser; how can the invigilator communicate with the participants? This helped us understand what the software can do and the logic of it. We gradually got to a level where we felt confident that we could run the exams. We did change the exam schedule: unfortunately, one of the first scheduled exams was one of the biggest, with 1,400 students, and we thought it would be a better idea to have the smaller exams at the start, see what works and doesn’t work and experience some real issues. We’d find out some things that we did not find out during the dummy testing.”

Running the exams

“Along the way, we actually figured out how to do this in a very good way. The first exams that we did, exams with a small amount of students (up to 50), went okay: people were generally happy, but we also experienced some things that were absolutely not related to the software but were related to the audience. Students were logging into the exam environment two, three minutes before the exam, which wasn’t enough time. We needed to set some clear rules for what to do. After the first exams, we said that every student needs to be online, ready to do the exam at least 15 minutes before the exam start. That mentality change that was necessary from our students was a big help, because from that moment onwards, we had very few students not able to start the exam in time. We also had students logging in from areas that didn’t have a very stable internet connection. For them, we created a war room with a dedicated phone line that if people were experiencing problems, they could call that number and they’d immediately get someone on the line that could help them and change the parameters of their exam if necessary.

“We knew we could use WISEflow to identify the students that were having problems. We told all the students to be there well in advance; when their flows became active, we knew they were doing the exam and were okay, but if they remained inactive, we knew they were having some trouble. So, we started calling them and saying, we are seeing you’re having trouble accessing the exam, what can we do for you? Some of the time we had the parents on the phone, and we’d say, your son is not making progress through the exam. A lot of parents were impressed by that. There was one incident with a student who had started the exam 15 minutes late and hadn’t made any progress. So, I called him, and the student had basically given up and was sitting next to his dad, enjoying a meal, thinking the exam was just over. I told him: no, come on, let’s go to your computer, we’re going to open up the exam. And though we’re going to organise retakes it’s better for you to do the exam now while you’re prepared. In the end, he completed the exam successfully and got back to me saying thank you, this is something I was never expecting from my school. That would have been impossible to do in an exam hall.

“We did also have our share of issues, which were more related to human errors with the exams. For instance, one of the first exams, when the professor wanted to correct the exam, we couldn’t find it anywhere. The exam was gone. We were able to see in the log file that someone had unintentionally deleted the exam. So, we had to call UNIwise and say, this is what happened, would there be a trace of this exam that we would very much like to recover, please? Luckily, it was there. But we then needed to make sure no to repeat this mistake. As everything is logged in the software, the license admins could find out what had happened and clearly explain to everybody what not to do.

“One of the most peculiar things that happened was a student in China who could, for whatever reason, not engage in any exams – the facial comparison blocked her every time. Based on the name, we didn’t know for sure the gender of the student until we had a chat over Zoom, and I helped her log into the system. That’s when I saw the facial comparison photo stored was of a man. What had happened is her brother had set it up for her and, of course, the software then wouldn’t let her sit the exam because it thought she wasn’t the proper student.

“We also had to make sure that everyone in the school and community was aware of the fact that we’re completely GDPR-compliant and whatever software we’re using has no access to the computer files – rather, we bring students to a cloud environment where they can’t do anything on the computer.”

Reflections

“For us, it’s a success story. It was something that we were able to do in very little time. That said, it’s not something I’d like to do every month! We worked on this literally night and day, but I had the impression that UNIwise was doing the same. There was the quality of the product, about which we were already convinced, but it was also the quality of the service that swayed us towards UNIwise. This was very important for the school. We needed proper support. It was very well done.

“At some schools, exams were postponed, or exams were organised in a substandard way. Our dean was adamant about doing all we can to be able to offer a degree that Is living up to the high standards that we have. Afterwards, we started receiving emails and phone calls from students’ parents thanking us and saying that they were impressed with the way we have dealt with the situation.

“If you’d asked in December, will you use software to run your exams with video monitoring? I would have said absolutely not, why would we? That was not something we ever thought we were going to do. But in March, everybody understood the necessity of change, so that helped quite a bit. The supporting team was ready to change, the professors were ready to change, the students were ready to change. They were ready to accept alternative ways of having the exam done.

“That we can use WISEflow in our school and in our examination rooms with alternative modes of examination has strengthened the idea that this has been a good change for the school, something we can build on. It’s not a one-time deal, just because of the coronavirus: it’s the beginning of a long-lasting relationship with UNIwise and something we will use in the semesters to come.”