For a few minutes earlier this year, a university entrance exam disrupted Slovakia’s phone network. As Covid-19 spread, Scio, a Czech education company that manages entrance exams for more than 80 faculties at Czech and Slovak universities, switched from holding its tests in person to carrying them out online. But, during one exam in Slovakia, the third-party system it used crashed for more than an hour, prompting thousands of worried students to call Scio’s Czech hotline.
“We were told that?.?.?. for a few minutes on one provider it wasn’t possible to call Slovakia because 10,000 people had decided to call the Czech Republic to ask what was happening,” says Martin Drnek, a manager at Scio.
The episode was one of the many forms of disruption caused by the rapid shift from the physical to the online world ushered in by the pandemic. Education worldwide has been thrown into chaos by Covid-19, with lockdowns and other disruption affecting more than 220m tertiary-level students, according to Unesco, the UN’s cultural organisation. At universities, not only have classes moved online, but entrance exams have undergone a digital shift to adapt to a Covid-affected world.