New students of the Home Study Course have the option of taking and submitting their exams on paper by regular mail or online through eCornell. This web page was created to provide the information necessary to help decide which of these options is right for you. Please continue reading for detailed descriptions of the exam options or click HERE to view a quick comparison of paper vs. online exams.

Students that choose paper exams upon enrollment will receive two-color printed exams and envelopes for submitting their assessments to the Course Coordinator. Although we encourage students to take their exams online, the paper exam option will continue to be offered for students who do not have access to a computer with an Internet connection or who do not feel comfortable taking exams online.

Online exams were created and are administered in collaboration with our distance learning and development partners at eCornell, a service-oriented business established and owned by Cornell University. Students that choose the online exam option will receive complete instructions and password information to access their assessments through the eCornell website. Online exam takers will have private access to pdf files of the paper exams on the web site and be able to print them at any time should they desire to choose their responses before entering them and submitting an assessment online.

The questions students will encounter while taking paper or online exams are currently identical. Future plans for the online exams include creating a bank of questions that can be drawn from at random to make each student’s testing experience unique. Establishing a bank of questions will also allow students to retake an exam and encounter a different set of questions from their first try, in cases when a second attempt is necessary for the student to successfully complete the course.

Aside from these positive future developments, online exams currently have several practical advantages over paper exams. These advantages include a faster turnaround time for grading of some sections, a score summary tool that allows students to review missed questions immediately, no additional costs for the postage required to mail paper exams to the Lab for grading, and a substantial reduction in the amount of paper required to administer exams.

Although we encourage students to take their exams online, there is currently one constraint to the exam taking process that will eventually be eliminated as eCornell develops the appropriate technology over the course of the next few months. Currently the online exams cannot be graded automatically in their entirety due to the variety of question types we employ. The majority of exam questions are either of the multiple choice or true/false type and are graded online automatically, so that the student knows their result for these parts immediately. Matching, labeling, fill-in-the-blank, and short answer type questions cannot currently be graded online automatically and must be cut and pasted to be emailed to the Course Coordinator for grading. As a result of this grading constraint, students can only know their result for part of each exam right away and must wait for some parts to be manually graded before they will know their final score for each exam. We are actively working with expert programmers at eCornell to eliminate this constraint and encourage all new students to not be dissuaded by this temporary limitation in light of the many remaining advantages that exist for online exam takers.

You can preview the online exams by following this link:

http://www.birds.cornell.edu/homestudy/OnlineExPreview.html

Quick comparison of paper vs. online exams

NOTE: Please feel free to send any questions to us at our official course email address: hstudy@cornell.edu.