When planning exams, the most important thing is that students should not have two exams fall on the same day. However, overlap is accepted where the submission deadline is the last day of an exam period for ‘written assignments’, e.g. projects.

When planning exams, special consideration is shown for first-year students in that their exams are evenly spread out during the exam period, if at all possible, thereby giving the students as much time as possible between the individual exams.

Exams are not planned for Sundays, public holidays and 23 December, and weekdays between Christmas and New Year must be avoided as far as possible.

Phases of exam planning

1. First, written exams are planned for courses followed by students from several different degree programmes (these exams are spread out over the entire exam period).
2. Exams for compulsory courses are then planned, allowing as much time as possible between them and the exams planned for the cross-disciplinary courses.
3. To the extent possible, major oral exams are planned according to the degree programmes the students are enrolled on to ensure the exam dates do not collide with the written exams.

Take-home assignments:

• No other exams are planned during the period of 24 to 48-hour take-home assignments for students who have these types of exams.
• For assignments other than 24 to 48-hour take-home assignments, submission deadlines are planned for the last day of the exam period. Then, other exams can be planned around this deadline.

Room situation:

• For both written and oral exams, the room situation must be taken into account.
• Planning must be coordinated both across the university and locally, so that more rooms can be used for both oral and written exams.

Individual considerations:

• As far as possible, the wishes of examiners and co-examiners are taken into account when planning exams.
• Only to a very limited extent can the planning take account of the special needs of individual students.

To ensure the quality of the exams, the following principles are applied at Faculty of Technical Sciences:

• The exam must align with the course content, including the learning objectives and the content during the semester (literature, assignments, teaching).
• The exam questions should be comprehensive, so that the widest possible range of topics is tested, and be adapted to the form of the exam. Furthermore, the progression of the education must be considered in the formulation of the exam questions.
• All students must be treated equally in the examination situation, so if previous exam questions are made available to the students, they must be made accessible to all students in the course via Brightspace.
• Exam questions from previous exams must not be reused. Reuse of exam questions may result in a retake. If appropriate, however, variations of previous exam questions may be used. In such cases, the variation must ensure that students have not answered identical assignments during the course or on previous exams.

About variations of exam assignments

Variation can be achieved even with minor changes to an assignment, which means that the student must relate to a new situation compared to a previous version of the assignment.
Smaller changes can, for example, mean that the student has to apply different knowledge, methods, skills, or competencies compared to before, or that the student's considerations become different, or that the most correct answer becomes a different one than in previous versions.It is important that you as the assignment setter consider the academic arguments for why this constitutes a sufficiently new situation for the students compared to previous assignment sets.

In connection with Multiple Choice exams, it is allowed to build a question bank that ensures an appropriate variation in exam questions from set to set.

Also find more knowledge about the exam situation and assignments on AU Educate.