Analyzing Student Experience of Time Trackers on Assessments

Visualizing time limits during online assessments is a cause of anxiety, affecting student performance. An initial survey of 34 students across two Computer Science courses found that time-tracking devices produced anxiety for 67.7% of students. While students differed on timer color preference, a majority preferred a count-down display showing time remaining with the ability to hide the timer. In a small pilot study across five exams, we employed multiple time-tracking displays. Preliminary data suggests that students presented with a count-down grayscale timer performed better on average than those presented with a green-yellow-red (GYR) version. Other displays, such as text-only digital count-down timer or elapsed time progress bars, did not elicit as large a difference in performance. These findings indicate the need for further study.