For my fully online course this semester, I changed the previously Online exam to being In-Person. Same test, but the class average dropped by 44%
I have run this online course 21 times now, mostly asynchronous. The online exam averages have been steadily rising over the last few years, going from normally high-70s to a new record last semester of a 90% class average on the exam. My concern was that the tests were being done more and more by AI, so this semester I required the students to do the test live and In-Person. This means not only no AI, but also that it would be closed-book, which is a substantial change in itself. I would not previously have strictly required them to be closed book. My initial plan was to rewrite the test from scratch, in particular to ease up on it given that it would now be closed book. But I decided, for this one semester, to simply do the same test and see how it went. With no AI, no open book, pure evaluation of what they have learned, the test's class average (that was 90% last semester) was 46% this semester.