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A Conceptual framework to conduct Online Examinations during the COVID-19 Pandemic: A context of a Public University in Sri Lanka

During this pandemic of COVID-19, the global transition into online exams has rapidly increased. As a result, worldwide higher education institutions plan to offer online exams for evaluating students’ performance to cope with the barriers for carrying out physical exams as usual. Although online exams play as an alternative that is timely and critical to pursuing academic programs, its sudden adoption might result in problematic situations. When considering the students’ perceptions, they come up with a variety of impressions including both positive and negative. Students prefer some set of evaluation methods and sometimes they refuse to follow the offered online evaluation methods by the instructors or lecturers. Dishonest behaviors have dynamically increased where the students widely attempt to cheat in online exams. This study expects to propose a novel framework for online exams as the best approach to evaluate students remotely that have been designed with the main focus of online evaluation methods, students’ preferences, and dishonest behaviors in online exams. The proposed framework is derived from 512 online survey responses which were conducted to capture students’ feelings on online exams at a public university in Sri Lanka. The proposed framework is built upon four main modules and the feasibility and validity are checked in the implementation process with ARENA simulation. The framework delivers a comprehensive overview to planning the online exams for the higher educational institution suddenly adopted into the online mode that can be taken as expert guidance for its successful implementation with higher levels of integrity and security.