Proctoring the COMC 2020 remotely

This year in addition to paper-based exams (Print = we mail printed exams to you, Digital Delivery = we email you the exams and you print them out), we also offer an online option of taking the exam. This is primarily for students who are studying from home. If you choose the online option, you will need to proctor students remotely.

In order to proctor students remotely, you would need to start a video meeting (e.g. via Zoom or Google Meet). You will invite all of your students into that meeting and take attendance. All students need to have their cameras turned on so you can confirm their identity and monitor them throughout the exam.

We are using a platform called Crowdmark for the exam. A personalized exam invitation link will be sent directly to each student's email account (a tool to enter student email addresses is in your CMS Competitions account under "Tools", provided you have ordered exams and set their mode to "Online"). You will have to instruct students not to begin the exam until you give them a signal to start via Zoom (or your other tool). When they click on the Crowdmark exam link in the email, they will be asked to log into their Crowdmark accounts using a web browser. We will ask all registered students to create an account on Crowdmark and complete a test exam (Crowdmark Enrollment Practice) a few days prior to the actual exam, to give them some familiarity with the platform.

In the actual exam, they will see the exam questions displayed on their screen within their Crowdmark accounts and will see a timer counting down 3 hours. The exam actually lasts 2.5 hours, but we are allowing half an hour after the exam for uploading solutions to Crowdmark. Students will write their solutions by hand on blank pieces of paper. After 2.5 hours, you will give students the signal to stop writing. From then on, they will have half an hour to upload their solutions. To do that that, they can use one of the many available free scanning apps (e.g. OfficeLens) to scan the papers with their solutions using their phones, save those as PDF and send them to their emails, then on their desktops, they should retrieve the PDFs from their emails and drop the files onto Crowdmark. Most of the students will be familiar with this process if they completed the Crowdmark Enrollment Practice a few days prior.

Prior to the exam, we will send you a link to an online proctor declaration form. After the exam you will fill out this proctor declaration form, confirming that you have supervised each of the students. If you have multiple proctors each supervising a subset of your students, each one will fill out the form for those students whom they have proctored.

Please note that all students writing the online exam in Canada and the Americas need to write at the exact same time: 12pm EST. If you choose to go with a paper-based exam, you can conduct the exam at any time that is convenient to you on Thursday, October 29th in Canada and the Americas and Friday, October 30th elsewhere in the world.

Teachers must provide an email address for each student writing remotely no later than October 22. You can provide the email addresses of your students through the Teacher Portal. Log into your school account here and select "Enter emails for COMC 2020 (English or French) online students" under the "Tools" box.