Instead of saying ‘take out a pen or pencil,’ professors at Penn State University will soon be saying ‘turn on your monitors’ while administering exams. Testing will take on a whole new meaning next semester utilizing brand new technological developments.

Penn State is opening a new testing center in the spring that will focus on innovative testing to better evaluate how students learn. The first of its kind in the nation, the testing center features high technology and special software to create more sophisticated kinds of testing.

Angela Linse, executive director and associate dean at Penn State, said the reason the provost agreed to fund the center is that the university knows a lot more about how to evaluate students’ learning abilities than it knew 10 years ago.

‘With technology, we can take advantage of what we know now in a different way than using paper and pencil,’ Linse said.

The testing center makes it possible to test much more complex kinds of thinking skills with more complex test questions. Linse said there are multiple ways to answer a test question correctly, but in pen and pencil tests, there is only one answer. The software allows professors to create questions emulating problem solving in the real world, where there can be more than one correct answer.

‘If you were an engineering professor and you were teaching a circuits course, you might want to ask students to identify certain aspects of a circuit board,’ Linse said. ‘If you had a graphic, they could be dragging items to the correct places. They could click radio buttons in one place.’

Linse also pointed out that handwritten tests do not offer much variety in questions.

She said one aspect of the new testing technology gives an initial opening question, and depending on the student’s answer, a supplementary question will be asked. ‘You can’t do that in paper and pencil,’ she said.

‘If you want to test somebody’s critical thinking skills, you can give an essay, but there are lots of other kinds of critical thinking besides written critical thinking skills,’ Linse said.

Will Kerr, manager of testing and scanning operations at Penn State, said the main purpose of the center is to innovate testing.

‘We want instructors to try using some new innovative ways to test their students,’ Kerr said. ‘But it is up to the professors whether they want to use it or not.’

Another advantage of the new testing center is that it allows more frequent testing, Linse said.

‘It takes pressure off of having a midterm and final,’ Linse said. ‘You could have a quiz every week, which helps students keep up with material. This won’t stress them out halfway through the semester.’

The new testing center will help students build knowledge throughout the semester because they will be using it frequently for testing, Linse said. This prevents students from cramming for exams and then forgetting the material the next day.

If a student has a bad day on the day of the test, Linse said it won’t ruin his or her grade because smaller tests are worth less.

‘They call that low-stakes testing rather than high-stakes testing,’ Linse said. ‘High stakes puts a lot of pressure on students, which causes them to use poor study skills and increases their temptation to cheat.’

Although cheating on tests is no more a problem at Penn State than it is at any other university, the testing center will use proctors, as well as video cameras, to curb cheating.

‘The center was not built because we ran into cheating,’ Kerr said. ‘And the only time we would actually review the footage from the camera is if there was an instance.’

Most articles written about the center emphasize the anti-cheating aspect of it, but the security is more like an additional benefit, Linse said.

‘The computers will scramble questions or there might be a bank of test questions so students might not even have the same questions,’ Linse said. ‘It is a secure and proctored environment.’

Another benefit of the center allows for students to have more flexibility in their scheduling, Kerr said.

The center is advantageous for scheduling purposes, as it allows professors to administer tests without using class time, Linse said.

‘There are 160 seats in the room, so large lectures would not be able to all go at the same time, but the instructor can either reserve a block of time or take the entire class at once,’ Linse said. ‘Students can also be assigned a block of time from say, Monday to Wednesday, to schedule an individual exam.’

The center also accounts for students with special needs.

‘We have built in the ability for additional time,’ Kerr said. ‘There are also some special work stations, wheelchair stations and stations with larger monitors and the ability to magnify screens.’

The new testing center also has secure technology that will prevent students’ work from being lost.

‘The servers in the testing center are separate from anything else,’ Linse said. ‘This is a way of ensuring nothing crashes because something else on campus happened.’

The software saves the tests periodically so that if the system does crash, students don’t lose progress on the test, Linse said. Professors are also being asked to supply a paper back-up in case the system did fail.

Linse and Kerr agreed the center would be useful for students.

Lauren Fischer, a human development and family studies major at Penn State, is anxious to see how the new center works out.

‘I think that it’s an interesting idea that will be even more interesting to see how it comes into actual use,’ Fischer said. ‘I think all the technology might be a little overwhelming for me because I’m very simple, but everyone’s got a different way of learning, and I can definitely see both sides.’