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Corona-safe exam: maximum fifty people per room

The exams start on Monday, October 26 and are partly on campus. The build-up starts tomorrow. The group size of those on-campus exams is limited: where previously a maximum of two hundred students would fit in a room, there is now a maximum of fifty. As a result, more halls and rooms have to be converted.

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photo Bart van Overbeeke
Moving company

That maximum of fifty students per room is the university's choice. Even though education is exempted from such a fixed maximum, “TU/e does not want to exploit the privilege that higher education has been granted,” says Patrick Groothuis, director of ESA. Converting the spaces is quite a job, especially now that fewer students can be in one room. So now more rooms are needed. Where in the past it concerned Matrix, Vertigo, Auditorium and the Student Sports Centre, now Atlas and MetaForum are also part of the deal. The conversion will take place on a Saturday because there are still lectures in the halls during the week. Service employee of the Auditorium Peter Engels explains why the university needs a moving company to help: “It is a major operation. We also looked at our cleaning company as an option, but in this case electricity is also important for the laptops and they draw the line there. Of course you could ask an electrician, but he will usually not move tables. The moving company Vlugo does both and has done the operation before. After two weeks when the exams are over, they will put everything back in the original lecture or workshop setup. The Student Sports Centre arranges these things itself, by the way.”

Proctorio

Ron Tempelaars, exam coordinator at ESA knows that a total of 5402 students will come to take a regular exam “and I estimate about a 100 more who take special exams, such as special facilities or opt-out.” The hybrid exams (simultaneously online with proctoring and on campus) have been changed to fully online. Groothuis indicates that by choosing to have the hybrid exams completely online, “the on-campus burden will decrease in total. As a result, we can still have around sixty exams on campus, but in small groups, just like we have for education. The Central Crisis Team (CCT) thinks this fits better in the spirit of the measures and the signals from the organization.”

The online exam is done with online proctoring via Proctorio. Online proctoring is something new for many (first-year) students. If you have insurmountable objections to an exam with Proctorio, you could request an opt-out for your exam with Proctorio until October 18. Those students have to take the exam on campus.

Do you have an exam in the coming two weeks? Cursor wishes you the best of luck!

 

The main photo is a file photo of the exams in the Student Sports Centre (SSC).

 

 

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