Challenging the temporal nature of exams - or - how to reinvent your academic calendar

Assessment is the biggest and most challenging area of any educational enterprise. It has a huge impact on the learning and teaching experiences of both students and staff. Despite the shift to more varied continuous assessment practices, summative exams maintain a critical function. They form an important piece of the assessment puzzle; particularly where professional accreditation bodies have a vested interest in academic integrity.   

 For any provider with a global footprint, and in particular hybrid universities that run examinations for distributed student cohorts, there is the opportunity to completely redesign the traditional logistics of running systems to distribute, administer, collect, and then mark paper-based scripts. 

 The innovative response described here allows a radical restructure of the academic practices surrounding assessment, mitigating: 

• The high stress of an ‘all or nothing’ activity. 
• Peak academic workload caused by exam periods.  
• Natural disasters and disruptions that put student progression at risk. 
• Limitations of paper-based exam design.  

• End of teaching load that curtails feedback.  
• An inflexible academic calendar. 

 

The solution UNE has adopted is to shift all assessment modalities into the digital space, driving a more agile, data rich approach to assessment operations. Students use their own computer (BYOD) from home or can avail themselves of a study centre. At UNE, after the initial pilot, a fast-track project successfully moved exams fully online by mid-2020. UNE has now benefitted from the experience of sitting almost 80,000 virtual exams.  

 The systems and services that have been brought together include: a fully managed proctoring service; exams scheduling software; and support for a bespoke portal to manage special extensions. 

 The solution has: removed the institutional barrier of face-to-face, time bound exams; provided agency to students to manage their commitments; rendered marking easier and faster; improved accessibility; permitted exams to be held anytime and easily rescheduled; enhanced academic integrity through randomised question pools and improved identity management; enabled authentic assessment with access to real world industry software and resources, rich media and interactive question types. 

 

This redesign of assessment modality started with a journey in the successful transformation of paper to digital modes of examination delivery, but it ends in a provocative challenge to what we understand as the purpose of, and approaches to assessment. The unique value proposition here is the pathway this creates from the complete redesign of traditional mechanisms of high-stakes testing to the emerging reality of on demand assessment and competency-based educational designs.  

 Furthermore, it releases the academic calendar from the tyranny of hard coded examination weeks at the end of each trimester and empowers students. With the new affordances of an unshackled calendar, any institution can create spaces for a transformational education agenda that builds the metacognitive skills of students and allows for deep targeted academic development and capacity building. 

Finally, this solution challenges the assumed value of assessment formats and timing, promoting valuable conversations with professional, academic and senior leadership staff. It forces a coherent assessment framework approach, policy development, co-design of assessment types, and tightens the feedback cycle. 

 

The major areas of benefit have been in our institutional agility, new ways of thinking about assessment, and staff and student satisfaction metrics, demonstrated in: 

• Reduction in use of examination centres from 450+ to zero. 
• Positive experience for staff who can invest in a set and forget exam format. 
• Student applications for deferred exams reduced from 9.45% in T1 2019 to 6.88% in T1 2021 

• Substantially increased institutional resilience – exams continue despite lockdowns. 
• 90% of technical issues are resolved in real time. 
• Student grievances are low and within tolerance limits of 0.16% of students. 
• Academic integrity matters are within expected parameters. Escalated misconduct cases are 0.0034% of exams. 
• Qualitative data from student responses to their experience of an exam show 85.4% of test takers score 4 or 5 (out of 5) satisfaction rating. 

• Reduction in privacy concerns with 2.6% of students reporting concern and the number reducing. 

 This solution presents a perfect match between technical transformation, intentional process refinement and, soft skills development. It is an institutional game changer that decouples assessment from the academic calendar and opens up the possibility for new, innovative rhythms of educational activity.