ERASMUS ONLINE EXAMS
An incentive for mobility
Today in the Didactics Council the Deans of the Schools once again confirmed the University’s willingness to take online exams while on Erasmus. How did this proposal come about? It is an idea from our electoral programme that we have been working on since December 2021, after exactly one year of work we will tell you a little of its history.
The idea stems from a real problem: European and international universities often have academic calendars that are completely different from those of the Politecnico, which means that a student has to leave for the start of classes but at the same time has the exam session underway at the Politecnico. For this reason, we thought we would take advantage of the tools introduced because of the pandemic, in the hope of improving students’ lives.
How did we work? A flood of academic calendars
To make our case, we acted as a team between Svoltastudenti, Polinetwork and the kind help of our fellow representatives of Independent Students
1. Request in the Didactics Council for the list of exchange destinations with the respective number of students leaving for the following semester.
Analysis of almost all exchange universities’ academic calendars, almost 400 universities with respective academic calendars.
The results of the analysis showed that: out of 1258 students, 462 have overlaps between the timetable abroad and the calendar of exams and report difficulties; 372 have none and of the remaining ones there are no precise indications.
The result
At the beginning of the session, the deans sent an e-mail to all lecturers indicating the possibility of having students who had to leave for the start of classes in the host university take online examinations. This reaffirms the university’s desire to encourage departures abroad and the Erasmus experience. However, it remains the teacher’s freedom to choose the examination methods in the case of online courses.
Over the past few semesters we have found that the vast majority of lecturers accept the request and have the exam taken online, but there are still a few borderline cases where this has not been possible: we believe that, since online exams are not regulated at ministerial level, the result obtained is a small great achievement. We continue to bring the topic up for discussion at the Didactics Council every semester.
