What should I let students do when they finish exams early?

Question

I organized my students to take their exams in the school’s computer labs. Some students finished well before others. In each section, I tried different policies for what students should do in this situation, but none worked very well.

1. I let one section of students leave when they finished, but make much noise while moving their chairs and gathering their things. Furthermore, I am concerned that students will find ways to cheat, e.g. leave and access the Web-based testing system from their iPod.

2. I let one section do as they like on the computers when they finished, but this made it difficult to determine who was finished and who was using resources to cheat on the exams.

3. I gave one section some extra credit work to do if they finished early, but many students did other homework instead, which led to similar difficulty in determining who was finished or cheating.

What is a good policy that does not cause interruption to other students but also does not hinder proctoring efforts?

Answer 1

Why were the students leaving early disruptive? Under the rules of every institution that I've been at you are under exam conditions until you leave the room. They should be utterly silent and respectful to other students or face the usual penalties for breaking the rules of exam conditions.

If you're not happy with them leaving early I'm not sure why you would do anything to occupy them. Make them sit in silence and wait for the the exam to finish. Boredom never killed anyone.

Answer 2

I would suggest perhaps letting them leave in a more constructive way - when finished, the student raises their hand and waits for a tutor to come to them. They state they've finished and are escorted, quietly, from the room. Add a minimum time at the start and end during which they can't leave, to avoid disruption at the important settling in and final rush times, but during the bulk of the exam, people will barely notice.

Alternately if they aren't allowed to leave by the faculty, I'd arrange something whereby the student has a marker (eg a red cone of paper) on their monitor during the exam. When they finish, they raise their hand again and you come to remove the cone, at which point they're allowed to browse and do homework etc. that way you can differentiate between those finished and those attempting to cheat.

Answer 3

I had one teacher, that put crossword or sudoku at the end of each test sheet. I think it is much better to give students something to do in the spare time. You should choose something that you can easily differentiate from cheating.

Answer 4

This is from personal experience as a student and proctor.

1. A student's "stuff" -- The best rule to have is that students are not permitted to bring anything to the testing site. If this is just not possible, you can ask students to put what they bring along a wall or up front, on the floor, near the teacher's desk. This rule alone can result in students bringing less stuff to the exam.

2. Phones and electronic devices -- Ask all students to pull their phones out before the exam starts and ask them to either put them on silent or simply turn them off. At this time, tell them to put them away and inform them that if a cell phone or other electronic device is seen in the open before the student leaves the exam room, they receive a zero on their exam. They can wait until they are in the hallway before looking at their missed calls/messages.

3. Computer monitor -- Tell students that after they have completed their computer-based exam to turn their monitor off. This can be optional based upon circumstances. You could also ask the students to close all open programs and return to the desktop.

4. Permit students to leave upon finishing their exam -- Tell students that they are in "exam mode" until they leave the room. Any spoken words that are not directed at a proctor or the instructor will result in a zero on their exam. They can retrieve their belongings from along the wall or from the area near the teacher's desk. You can even go so far as escorting students to the door and opening and closing it behind them.

5. DO NOT assume that students who finish last are weak students -- I am a graduate student and am usually one of the last to complete an exam. I am also one of the highest grades in the class. Some students have text anxiety or concentration problems that cause them to take longer on their exam. You can even offer to allow students who know that they take longer on an exam or have concentration issues to sit in desks that are furthest from the door or locations that are prone to disruption from students leaving.

I hope you find this useful.

Answer 5

I simply make an announcement with, say, 30 minutes to go requesting that, to respect the concentration of the students still working, students finishing early remain quietly seated until time is up.

This usually has the intended effect. The worst thing that's happened is that some students get up and try to leave immediately after that announcement. I meet them in the aisle and quietly repeat my request.

Answer 6

You did not specify what grade level these students are at. I tutor third-graders, and if they are let go early, they are definitely disruptive. But if this is college level, you are nominally dealing with legal adults. Forcing them to stay in the room until class is over sounds like unlawful restraint. I didn't even require that my students show up, except for the major exams. But they would lose all possible points for class participation, and hand-in assignments were always due. But, I explained, their chances of passing one of the exams were very close to zero unless they managed good study habits. A couple students tried this each term. Some got A+ and some got F. I finished one of my 3-hour PhD exams in 20 minutes, handed it in, and walked out of the room. It never occurred to me to ask permission, and if I had, the exam proctor would have thought it bizarre. (I passed with a perfect score).

If you have college students who are "disruptive" if they are not in class, your school has deeper problems than whether or not students can leave exams early, and they are not your problem. Even as an undergrad, we were treated as responsible adults, and such grade-school silliness as I've been reading here would never have happened.

I'm amazed that college-age students even tolerate such treatment. Or need it.

Note: if the students are disruptive, one way to control them is have them line up, buddy-to-buddy, and hold hands while walking in the halls. Like I did in pre-K.

Answer 7

I do see the general concerns of allowing students to leave early; after all, they might meet up with whoever leaves for the bathroom while still taking the exam and provide them with information specific to the exam.

Now, of course that could happen as long as no-one has left, too. Someone could hide information in the bathrooms, or someone could meet up with someone not taking part in the exam at all, or that latter person could hide some information in the bathrooms after the exam has started. These issues could be mitigated in the following cases:

• Only students taking part in the exam can enter the bathrooms. This depends a lot on the architecture; unless the lecture hall is extremely large (> 500 seats maybe, from what I could observe so far in universities?), the average number of required toilets at any moment during lectures generally does not warrant an extra set of bathrooms reserved for a single lecture hall. And even then, those bathrooms seem to be more often than not accessible in a way that one does not have to cross the lecture hall (and thus can enter and leave the bathrooms without anyone in the lecture hall noticing), for the very purpose of allowing outside people to use the bathrooms without disturbing whatever is going on in the lecture hall.
• Students need to be accompanied to the bathroom door. Depending on how many proctors were assigned, and the size of the room/number of students, this may or may not be feasible. And even then, it would not totally prevent the exchange of information to take place in the bathrooms themselves.
• The inside of the bathrooms needs to be checked whenever a student is brought there. This would require to have at least one male and one female proctor around. Highly unlikely to happen in gender-unequal disciplines such as computer science.

Those cases of cheating would be somewhat undirected, anyway. It may depend on the exams, but we generally try to not ask for any knowledge that needs to be memorized (in some cases, notes are even allowed during the exam). Our exams are usually designed in a way to test whether some knowledge can be applied in scenarios that are described on the exam sheets. Hence, the major concern is not cheating by accessing the course material or other references; the major concern is having someone else specifically solve one's particular tasks from the exam at hand. Therefore, what needs to be prevented is the contact between someone who is still taking the exam with someone who also knows the exam tasks. The straightforward solution to this is asking students to wait until everyone has finished.

Another point is that no matter how quiet students try to be, when they get up, they will make at least some noise:

• Walking around creates some noises on non-carpeted floor, so that should generally be minimized. Leaving for the bathroom is allowed as there are medical reasons for that, but there are usually no such reasons that would warrant the impatience of having to leave right away.
• Students who leave need to pack their stuff (writing utensils, drinks/food, other objects they needed to have around such as watches and their student IDs), which again will create some (more than just from writing) sounds.
• In case of "lecture hall" type rooms, that do not have single chairs, but folding seats mounted to the next row of tables, students who do not sit right next to an aisle can only leave by making everyone else between themselves and the aisle get up. It is annoying when that happens in a cinema, and it is downright antisocial to disrupt someone's concentration like that who is taking an exam.

Some students may complain that they are wasting time, and - from an egoistical point of view - they may be right. However, unless we can provide a single room and a single proctor for every single student, that is not how exams realistically work:

• They do not have to stay for an unexpected amount of time. If the exam was scheduled to take place between 2 PM and 4:30 PM, they can expect to leave by 4:30 PM. The time was known beforehand, and they will have arranged their schedule accordingly.
• They are not the only ones taking the exam. Indeed, they (think they) have finished their own exam. But that doesn't mean they can stop caring about their environment at that moment, as the world still isn't centered around them; once they have stopped writing, it is their obligation to allow the other students to finish the exam without any further disruptions. I do not believe in punishing students who take longer by giving them an even harder time. Proctors need to guarantee avoidable disruptions are avoided, and giving in to someone's impatience is definitely avoidable.
• The time is only wasted if they decide to waste it. There are plenty of things to do while waiting in a silent environment; from thinking - to get one's thoughts away from the exam topic - to sleeping. All of those are much less counterproductive with respect to the other students than insisting on creating more noise by leaving immediately.
• Some overhead is to be expected. Reading out the exam rules and checking attendance in the beginning takes quite some time (in large exams, often more than 20 minutes). That is expected when taking an exam, and likewise, students should expect that there will be some time after they have finished writing that they still need to spend in the exam room.

Therefore, my general preference is to simply ask them to wait till the time is over. They can use some of that time to make sure they completed everything correctly (when do you ever get the chance/time to check what you wrote in an exam? You should use that opportunity!), and other than that, they are adults. They should be able to show a little patience on a few occasions.

EDITED to further address some more specific points that were brought up in various of the comments in this thread.

Answer 8

It depends a lot on the class and on the age of the students, which the original poster did not share. University students are expected to behave like adults, secondary school students may need a bit more supervision, especially if the school is not set up to accommodate students with no particular assigned place to be.

If a lot of students are going to be finishing early it may not be possible to give them a place where they can sit separately and use materials that contain possible exam help (even their class textbook may be inappropriate to read within view of students who are still working on the exam); in this case it may be best to provide reading material on the exam computer that will allow them to get an early start on future work, such as a reading assignment from a later chapter of the coursework.

Extra credit questions on the exam may also provide a way to keep all students occupied for the full exam time.

(As an illustrative example, I finished my final exam in a university economics class in 20 minutes, checked my work three times, and still walked out in less than a third of the allotted time. Telling students to spend the extra time to check their work may not be helpful.)

Answer 9

I'm going to agree with Jack on a couple points (why is students stepping out disruptive?) - with few exceptions and on major difference I think:

Test is over, class is not over

The main difference I'd like to point out is that in my limited experience (as a student) the test being over doesn't mean the class is over - normally that means you start lecture on the next chapter/section/subject... After a test students are free too:

• sit at their computer - visible to staff and clearly not involved in test taking activities
• run to the store (nearby, in building, snack shack)
• just meander outside in the hallways until everyone is done - being respectful of our class AND neighboring classes.
• etc
• be back in your seat at X-time for further lecture

Either at a predetermined time (Test is 45 minutes) or as soon as all students are done taking the test, a 15 minute break commences that is then followed by further class time.

Test starts at 11 in the computer lab. You have until 12:15 to be finished (60 minutes for test, 15 minutes for break) and seated in the normal class room. Be respectful of those taking test, and those in nearby class rooms is more than reasonable if you are doing it outside of the normal classroom (computer lab).

What do you consider disruptive?

I think all of these suggestions to "Raise your hand to get permission" reeks of grade school and isn't something you do with responsible adults. I would find THAT more disruptive than Be quiet, respect others and wait or step outside until the test+break is over

But I think a major unanswered part is what are YOU calling disruptive? Students weaving through packed seats? Students saying "I'm done"? Students simply moving? Doing cartwheels through the isles due to the joy of finishing a test?

If you need to put up a guide, and treat it like every other disclaimer -

• Don't eat the Chiclets included with your hard drive.
• don't use hair dryer while in the shower.
• Don't do cartwheels after the test.

... because SOME idiot had to eat the Chiclets or use a hair dryer in the shower, then do so. But I think those kinds of situations are probably covered in the generic "Don't do that" information you get when you start college.

Answer 10

Based on your question, it sounds like several students may be asked to sit quietly for 30+ minutes. I don't know the specific policies of your university, but here are a few suggestions.

1. If you have an empty back row, allow any student who has turned in his exam to take a seat behind currently working students and use phone, laptop etc.

2. Have a TA offer student escorts outside the building every 10-15 minutes. This will be the way students can leave before the exam is up.

3. Double check policies. Universities in America (and likely Europe) generally count the exam done when the student gets up from the chair. The students are not generally disruptive as they leave the building, and the no in and out policy prevents students from colluding in the bathroom.

Answer 11

Among the three policies you suggested, only Policy 1 - Let them leave when they're done is good - or rather, it's the only morally acceptable one.

The reason is that you have no right to keep people in their seats doing nothing when they're done with their exam. That would be treating them like prisoners. You can and should make an effort to arrange things so that their leaving will be less disruptive (e.g. chairs which don't make a scratching noise when pulled...) - but nothing beyond that.