Unisa Address Online Examination Problems

As the academic year approaches its climax, students around the country will be writing exams in order to demonstrate what they've learned over the past year.
Many of these students hope to graduate while others work to be promoted to the next year of their chosen course. While some students may go to campus to complete their exams in person, others have to use online platforms.
Students from the University of South Africa (Unisa) have complained that technical glitches in the university's online examination system are preventing them from completing their exams.
Phindiwe Kamolane, Unisa's Chair of the Online Examination Committee says that only 7 modules out of 3000 modules were affected by the technical glitches. She explains that this only represents 0.7%.
She explains that in one instance, the servers were down for 15 minutes at the beginning of an examination. She says that while this may have disadvantaged students, the 15 minutes were added at the end of the examination period to make up for the time lost.
Kamolane is calling on students to start submitting their answer scripts at the beginning of the one hour period that is provided. She says that a large volume of students will try and submit during the final five minutes and this could lead to the system kicking them out.
She said, “We found that students are coming in five minutes before the closing time. So given the size of their answer scripts, the system may take long for it to accept the students' scripts given the network the students will be having on their side, in such cases the system then closes the examination session for submission and the student is kicked out”.
Kamolane also says that some students are ill-prepared to complete online examinations. This, as the institution requires students to download an invigilator application with the purpose of detecting cheating or plagiarism. The app needs to be downloaded by students and be started in a specific time period to ensure that the student is invigilated. If not, then the student will be kicked out.
“The invigilator app went down, but instances where students are experiencing errors, we are seeing it either through late registrations or Unisa itself not having provided the student numbers to the supplier, hence it's important for students then to register on the app the day before” concluded Kamolane.