The Online Exam (OLEX) System was developed by ITS in collaboration with the Examinations Office for use in holding online exams. OLEX enables teachers to upload an exam paper and make it accessible to students enrolled in their course at the scheduled exam time. It enables students to upload their answer files to the system and teachers to download them in the form of zip files (100MB per zip file).

Moodle Quiz enables teachers to create question types such as multiple choice, true/false, and short answer questions. The question bank created in Production Moodle [Moodle (Learning Platform)] can be imported and reused for different quizzes.

Zoom functions have been embedded in OLEX for exam proctoring.  Student will be invigilated by the assigned invigilators by using 2 cameras (laptops and mobile phone).  Their PC desktop has to be shared during exam for random check by examiners, delegates or invigilators.

No. OLEX-Moodle is a standalone system for online exams. Students upload their answer files through the OLEX-Moodle platform directly. Turnitin, which does not guarantee the response time, cannot be used in conjunction with OLEX-Moodle as there is a hard submission deadline for online exams. If necessary, teachers can submit students’ answers (only for typed answers) to Turnitin after the online exam has taken place.

No. It is not allowed. Examiners can use “Assignment” function to collect scanned answer files from students. To keep the questions available on OLEX-Moodle but not available to download, please enter the questions directly under description box in Assignment activity settings page.

Yes. To provide better support to students and ensure greater fairness, online invigilation via the Zoom platform will take place. There will be 2 Zoom meetings for a student to join:

(a) Invigilation session, and
(b) individual Desktop-sharing session.

Online exams in OLEX are arranged by sub-classes and Zoom meetings of Invigilation session for the group of 49 students (or fewer) in each sub-class will be scheduled to facilitate invigilation. One invigilator will be assigned to each Invigilation session (Zoom meeting) to invigilate the assigned students and to ensure proper conduct of the exam. All students are required to join the Invigilation session (Zoom meeting) of their exam by using the camera of their laptop, capturing their front face and a mobile phone, capturing their exam environment. 

A student has to share his/her PC desktop via another Zoom link (Desktop-sharing session) to share the PC screen during exam for the random check of Examiners, Delegates and Invigilators. A student may be regarded as violating the exam regulations if he/she is not following the Instructions to Candidates Sitting Online Examinations issued by Examinations Office.

No, any tablet or mobile phones are able to act as the second device of the Zoom meeting of Invigilation session of Online Examination at OLEX.

iPad and tablet should not be used to conduct Online Examination as they are not able to perform local recording in the individual Zoom meeting of Desktop-sharing session.  However, students can use iPad or tablet with the latest version of Zoom apps to act as the second device and capture the exam environment and join the Zoom meeting of Invigilation Session.

The video of Desktop-sharing session will be automatically saved to the local-drive of a student’s PC.  The student then uploads it to his/her OneDrive or Google Drive.  He/she shares the hyperlink of the video in OneDrive or Google Drive to OLEX-student platform within 6 hours (for courses having exam end time before 6:30 pm) or 12 hours (for courses having exam start time after 6:30 pm) after the end of scheduled exam. Other cloud drives are prohibited.

Since the stability of Zoom Cloud Recording is hard to guarantee with a lot of on-going video Zoom recordings, to avoid missing of Desktop-sharing session video, it is required to save the video to the local drive of students’ PC and upload to OneDrive or Google Drive afterward. 

The chance of “fail to upload desktop-sharing session video within required time frame” is low.  During the sample test, the rendering of 3.5 hours of Zoom video takes less than an hour (the rendering process is automatic, it will not be affected even the student is taking the second exam) and it takes another 15 minutes to upload to OneDrive or Google Drive.  The students who are having 2 consecutive exams (end at 12:45 pm and 5:45 pm including grace period) can make use of the remaining time after the second exam (5:45 pm – 6:30 pm) to upload the video. 

Invigilator can recreate the Zoom link for the student by clicking “Edit” button next to the Desktop-sharing session in Zoom group list.  Copy the UID of student and paste into the provided cell and click “Re-create”.  Ask the students to refresh the OLEX-student platform to obtain the new Zoom link. 

If the Zoom link of Desktop-sharing session is not started yet, use the “Chat” function of the Zoom meeting of Invigilation session to notify the student (not to everyone) to start the Zoom meeting of Desktop-sharing session immediately.

All students required to sit an online exam must register with the Online Exam System for Students. They have to provide a contact phone number and a non-HKU email address (apart from connect.hku.hk) to receive acknowledgement of their answer file submission. Examiners and delegates are able to download the registration list per courses at the OLEX staff platform.

Dell Optiplex 7460 All-in-One PC
Intel i7-8700 (4.6GHz) CPU,
1 x 16GB RAM,
512GB M.2 PCIe Solid State Drive

OR

Dell Latitude 5310 Laptop
Intel i5-10210U (4.2GHz) CPU,
1 x 8GB RAM,
256GB M.2 PCIe NVMe SSD

are the same model of our classroom PC and they are tested to be stable with an exam session on OLEX. 

The examiner and the delegate(s) of a course must upload and preview their course exam paper. They may re-upload their course exam paper if necessary. They must upload the exam paper at least 48 hours in advance of the exam.

Before the exam, the examiners should establish an efficient communication channel (e.g. via WhatsApp, WeChat, or Skype Group Chats) with the invigilator(s) so that they can be consulted especially during the first 30 minutes of the exam when students are allowed to raise questions about the question paper. Where necessary, please contact the Department Office for help in establishing the communication channel.

The examiners should also inform the students and invigilators in advance how the answers should be presented (to be typed on a computer or handwritten), how the webcam should be set up during the Zoom meetings and if they are required to turn their mobile slowly to show 360 degree of their exam environment.  Please refer to the Zoom Proctoring TechnicalGuideline  for details.

Before the exam, examiners should also inform the students and invigilators of other details (e.g. whether the exam is open-book, whether use of calculators is allowed, etc.).

The examiners should check if all the invigilators are ready for the invigilation.

Please refer to the Step-by-Step User Guide for Invigilators Using OLEX and go through the steps in session B.

Students are instructed to join the Zoom meetings 30 minutes before the start of the exam. They will be asked to give consent to the recording of the Zoom meeting of Invigilation session prior to joining it. As soon as they have joined the assigned Zoom meeting, they will be sent initially to the Waiting Room. The invigilator shall start admitting students in pair (their laptop and mobile phone) into the Zoom meeting after checking their names against the student list which is available on the OLEX platform. Students should use their full name (i.e. the name which appears on the University ID card or Moodle Guest Account) as their display name in Zoom and turn on their video when joining the Zoom meeting.  Before admitting the students to the Zoom meeting, the invigilator should send a Chat message to all students in the waiting room reminding them to change their display name to the one shown on their University ID card or Moodle Guest Account.

The invigilator shall confirm that each student has fulfilled the requirements and conditions as set out in the Zoom Proctoring Technical Guideline prepared by TELI (e.g., the position of their webcam, whether they have turned off the virtual background, any environmental factors that might affect the invigilation, etc.) and advise the students to take any appropriate action if necessary. He/She should also check with the students if they can hear his/her voice clearly in Zoom.

(Optional) Ask all students to move the camera of their mobile phones slowly to capture the 360 degree of the exam environment and use Panopto to record the whole process if it is required by the examiner.

The OLEX exam will start automatically at the scheduled time. At the end of the exam, the invigilator will make the “Time-is-up announcement” verbally and in writing via the Chat function on Zoom.

Yes. Students are allowed to raise questions regarding the question paper during the first 30 minutes of the exam via the Chat function on the Zoom meeting of Invigilation session. The invigilator shall respond promptly to the student and seek advice from the examiner whenever necessary. Where instructed by the examiner, a special announcement related to the question paper should be made to all students via Zoom verbally and in writing in the form of a Chat message.

Please watch out for any students who appear in the Waiting Room after the start of the exam and admit them immediately. In case any special announcement related to the question paper has previously been made to the students, please inform the latecomers of these special announcements via the Chat function on the Zoom meeting of Invigilation session.

Students may request to leave temporarily for the washroom break during an exam and may raise their request via the Chat function on Zoom. The invigilator shall respond to the student and approve their request. Record the time when the student leaves and returns. The invigilator shall pay special attention if a student has been away from the meeting for an unusually long period (e.g. 5 minutes or more) and check with him/her whether he/she has any problem (e.g. sickness) upon his/her return. The invigilator shall record the incident and report to the examiner and the Examinations Office immediately if there are any suspected irregularities.

Invigilators should observe the students regularly during the exam. In case students are shown in more than one page of the gallery view of the Zoom meeting of Invigilation session, they should flip different pages in every 2 minutes in order to observe all students at regular times. They should also check the Chat messages regularly and attend to the students’ questions/requests promptly. Students shall not communicate with others during the exam and the invigilator shall observe the real time behaviour of students and prompt a student if necessary to ensure that he/she does not violate this requirement.  Invigilators are also required to do random checking of the Zoom meeting of Desktop-sharing sessions of students and it is advised to do the checking by using a second-device (either tablet or mobile phone).

If students complete their exams before the scheduled end time, they are not allowed to leave both Zoom meetings until the end of grace period.

In case any irregularities happen during the exam (e.g. a student is found to be communicating with another person), the invigilator should capture the screen showing the video of the student concerned by using the “Print Screen” function of the computer and save it in MS Word, or record the student with the “Screen Recording” function of MS Powerpoint. Please report the incident to the examiner and the Examinations Office immediately but allow the student concerned to continue with the exam.

Yes. If you investigate any suspicious sound in the Desktop-sharing session, report the incident to the examiner and the Examinations Office immediately but allow the student concerned to continue with the exam.

As recordings should be uploaded in chunks of 90 minutes, invigilators should stop the recording after every 90 minutes, upload it and immediately start a new recording.

Yes. We allow students a grace period of 15 minutes to upload their answer files to OLEX in a single file of up to 30MB. The answer file must be a Word/PDF/ZIP file, as instructed by the examiner. An acknowledgement email will be sent to the student’s HKU email and registered non-HKU email addresses, and an acknowledgement message will be shown on the OLEX page after successful submission.

For the students who are taking Moodle Assignment on OLEX-Moodle, they are provided with 15 minutes grace period as well.  Their answer files have to be put in a single file of up to 20MB, including but not limited to Word/PDF/ZIP/PowerPoint/Excel file as instructed by the examiners, Students are able to confirm if they have uploaded the answer file successfully by clicking the file they have submitted. 

Please note that there are few exceptional courses which are having grace period with 20 minutes or 30 minutes.  All parties are able to verify with the grace period in OLEX platform.

No. They have to use a 3rd device to take photo of their answer files and use either USB or cloud drive to send the combined file (pdf) to their 1st device (PC or laptop) for submission to OLEX or OLEX-Moodle. Sending the file by using communication tools such as “WeChat and WhatsApp” are prohibited.

For the courses using OLEX for exam, examiners can download the answer files in zip files (100MB per zip file).

For the courses using OLEX-Moodle for exam, examiners can download all answer files for Moodle Assignments in one single zip file, and download the quiz result in excel format.

The answer files can be read online in soft copy, or can be printed and read in hard copy.

All exam papers and answer files will be kept within OLEX and OLEX-Moodle, the systems hosted by ITS at HKU until 60 days after the grade release date. Examiners can also check the course logs in OLEX-Moodle.

Zoom meetings of Invigilation session will be recorded via Panopto and they will be treated as strictly confidential and destroyed 60 calendar days after the announcement of final course results or when any relevant investigation is completed or any relevant dispute is resolved, whichever is the later.  For more details, please read the document Handling of the Online Exam Proctoring Recordings.

Yes. The major challenge involves students currently resident in Mainland China. HKU has secured special leased line that will enable these students to connect directly to OLEX for online exams. We will therefore be able to conduct all online exams through OLEX. For details, please refer to User Guide for Connection in China.

Yes. Teachers can access resources on OLEX website,  FAQ, trainings and demonstration videos are provided. There is a Drill and Mock Online Exam Platform for examiners, delegates and invigilators to familiarize the operation of OLEX.

For courses using OLEX for exam: SEN students who have approval to use extra examination time and/or supervised breaks should email their answer file directly to the designated email address immediately after the examination. They should refer to the timetable provided by the Examinations Office for the email address to which the file should be sent.

For courses using OLEX-Moodle for exam: Special submission time can be set for SEN students by using the User Override Function of OLEX-Moodle.  For details, please refer to the Step-by-Step User Guide for Examiners and Delegates Using OLEX.