Measuring the score advantage on asynchronous exams in an undergraduate cs course

This paper presents the results of a controlled crossover experiment designed to measure the score advantage that students have when taking exams asynchronously (i.e., the students can select a time to take the exam in a multi-day window) compared to synchronous exams (i.e., all students take the exam at the same time). The study was performed in an upper-division undergraduate computer science course with 321 students. Stratified sampling was used to randomly assign the students to two groups that alternated between the two treatments (synchronous versus asynchronous exams) across a series of four exams during the semester. These non-programming exams consisted of a mix of multiple choice, checkbox, and numeric input questions. For some questions, the parameters were randomized so that students received different versions of the question and some questions were identical for all students. In our results, students taking the exams asynchronously had scores that were on average only 3% higher (0.2 of a standard deviation). Furthermore, we found that the score advantage was decreased by the use of randomized questions, and it did not significantly differ based on the type of question. Thus, our results suggest that asynchronous exams can be a compelling alternative to synchronous exams.