Abstract—The education system has dramatically changed
from physical to online due to COVID-19. Millions of learners
around the world have been affected due to the pandemic
caused by coronavirus. The emergence of COVID-19 has forced
educational institutions to divert all strategies from physical to
online platforms for the safety of the students, instructors, and
all the other staff members. The processes of examining
students and their assessment strategies are heavily affected due
to the sudden adoption of online education than physical
education at campus. The research in this paper discusses issues
relevant to online assessments and the strategies used by the
universities due to COVID-19 in the region of UAE. The
research collected data through an online questionnaire from
312 undergraduate university students in UAE to understand
their behaviour. Furthermore, their performance of online
assessment is gauged through the analysis of exams transcripts
and comparison is made with their previous GPA and CGPA to
understand the effects of COVID-19 on their overall
performance. Semi-structured interviews were conducted to
discuss issues related to e-assessment and recommendations are
made to improve the online assessment process in universities.
The research proves that students have benefited from the
online assessment.
Index Terms—Covid-19, Corona, e-assessment, university,
students, online education.
Liaqat Ali is with the Department of Information Technology, College of
Engineering and Information Technology, University of Science and
Technology of Fujairah, P.O. Box: 2202, Fujairah, United Arab Emirates
(e-mail: liaqat22@gmail.com).
Nidal Al Dmour is with the Department of Information Technology,
College of Engineering and Information Technology, Ajman University
UAE (e-mail: nidal75@yahoo.com).
Cite: Liaqat Ali and Nidal Abidal Hamid Hmoud Al Dmour, "The Shift to Online Assessment Due to COVID-19: An Empirical Study of University Students, Behaviour and Performance, in the Region of UAE," International Journal of Information and Education Technology vol. 11, no. 5, pp. 220-228, 2021.
Copyright © 2021 by the authors. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited (CC BY 4.0).