Running Written Exams Online at Bern University amid the COVID-19 Pandemic

The unprecedented challenges that the world faced during the Covid-19 pandemic, reached also the education community. Our research group, offering two lectures at the time, presents and discusses in this white paper, the decisions and actions taken to ensure the integrity of each final examination. After considering various alternatives, the most suitable approach according to our requirements was to run an online written examination using the «Zoom Meeting» platform. During that, the questions were being released (sequentially) as video and the answers were emailed as photographs, using a smartphone. Throughout the whole process, the students never gained physical access to their computers. Familiarizing them with a pre-exam test under the same examination process, was proved to be vital. A lot of problems were revealed and addressed then, leading to a very smooth and successful final examination which according to the students' feedback, was sincerely appreciated.