For all you #university professors out there, I have a list of suggestions from students on how to create much better online exams. (I just came out of a lunch meeting with students in our Science, Research & Society club, and they have some really good thoughts):

Test design matters. Students are taught to go through and read a whole exam before starting to answer, and then to answer the questions that they are confident about, first. If you design your exam with each question on a different page, they can't do this. Put it on one page.

If you MUST put your exam onto multiple pages, make sure that they can go back and add things. No one has a fully linear mind. Brains pop up with added information six questions later, but if they can't go back and rework question 2, are you really testing their knowledge? No.

Clicking back and forth eats up huge amounts of time and wifi as well, which is another problem. If your exam is time sensitive to complete, wasting time via clicking and risking disconnection to the exam in this way is a major disservice to students.

Some faculty will use TAs or other senior students to 'test' a test and see if the timing is correct. This sounds great, but isn't. A learning student needs more time to focus, understand, process and answer a question than a student who has already mastered the material.

Different computer abilities and knowledge. There are so many tech problems related to browsers, computer speeds, clearing cookies before an exam, and so on that it's important to remember that students are also learning all of this stuff.

Tech guide. What do you want students to do if, while they are doing their exam, they run into a technical problem -- either theirs or, frankly, yours? It's happened to almost every student. Thinking through what you want/need them to do (screenshot, email, text) is key.

Writing an exam at home is NOT the same as writing one in class. There is a whole realm related to shared space that students have to navigate: roommates, pets, kids, parents, someone sucking up the wifi, competing exams or presentations, etc etc etc.

If you're a faculty member with family, pets or other people also working out of the home, you should understand these constraints. Yet, there is an assumption that students are sitting in a well-appointed room with no distractions, perfect internet and perfect computers. No!

For all of these reasons, the ever-smaller and fixed-in-stone time frame to write exams is ludicrous. The presumption of guilt/cheating is putting students at a huge disadvantage and contributing to unreasonable stress levels.

Some of your students are NOT in your city! How many of your students are in a different time zone, trying to write your exam in the middle of the night? Or rural, with spotty and slow internet? More than you might realize.

So, keep all exams open for 24 hours, design them with as few clicks as possible, and remember that as chaotic as your life is, theirs is too. So be respectful. And, they will respect you in return. And, you might actually get a sense of their knowledge, which is the whole point.