CBTF

Computer-Based Testing at UC Berkeley

We care about computer-based testing both because it is a key ingredient of scalable mastery learning and because it provides an important level of academic integrity for summative assessments. Read whichever background speaks to you most…

Mastery Learning

As far back as 1968, Benjamin Bloom and others recognized that if you give students schedule flexibility when working through material (since some students learn certain concepts faster than others) and multiple opportunities to practice (and to demonstrate mastery, such as through second-chance or re-take exams), you can narrow learning and achievement gaps among those students — particularly important when some of them may come from socioeconomically disadvantaged backgrounds. This approach is called mastery learning, and computer-based testing allows us to effect some important ingredients of it economically at scale.

AI

So much for honor codes: The AI "cheating crisis" is real, and some have suggested going back to proctored exams and handwritten blue books. Yes to human proctors! But UIUC professor Craig Zilles and I strongly agree that going back to "blue books" is a good idea: Advances in technology make  computer-based testing a far superior alternative.

Inspired by the work pioneered at the University of Illinois, Dan Garcia and I became the faculty leads for developing Computer-Based Testing at UC Berkeley, including onboarding new faculty, (cheer)leading the efforts to establish computer-based testing facilities (CBTFs) on campus, showing the benefits achieved through mastery learning and accessibility as well as academic integrity, and even teaching students how to create and evaluate rich authentic assessments that work with PrairieLearn.

Updates

On Monday, August 31, 2026, UC Berkeley’s brand-new 100-seat CBTF in the remodeled Moffitt Library went into production!

This is a major milestone for us. It was only in Fall 2023 that we tried a pilot of a “proto-CBTF” using shared lab space and serving a single ~230-student course for a final exam only. As of August 2026, the newly-opening CBTF has already scheduled nearly 40,000 student-exam-hours across more than 20 courses for Fall 2026.

This SIGCSE Virtual 2026 paper discusses that bootstrapping process and lessons learned, and should persuade you that you can do this at your institution too, without boiling the ocean all at once. The latter was not a foregone conclusion, given that we heavily modeled our approach on that developed organically over several years at the University of Illinois and other institutions.