1. OEB GLOBAL
FRIDAY 24TH NOVEMBER 2023
Assessing for a World Beyond
Assessment
Marieke Guy (Head of Digital Assessment)
2. University College
London (UCL)
• 11 faculties, 60+ departments
• 43,800 students, 14,300 employees, 440 UG,
675 PG programmes
• 53% international students, 150+ nationalities
• C520,000 student to assessment instances
• Variety of assessments but still majority exams
and coursework
• Procured assessment platform in 2021
3. Assessment – A wicked
problem?
• Multifaceted, many stakeholders, complex and difficult
to find a solution
• Challenges: Academic integrity, Generative AI, ensuring
students equipped for a life beyond assessment, equity
and inclusion, quality assurance, fairness, fostering
improvement (feedback), dealing with scale, staff
workload
• Assessment for learning
• Assessment drives learning
4. New ways of assessing:
Integrating AI
• Significant challenges for sector
• UCL AI experts’ group
• Resources created including
categorisation and menu of ideas
• AI hackathon & student panel
• Case study: Bartlett modules on machine
learning led by Dr Josep Grau-Bove
• Student change maker projects
5. New ways of assessing:
Optionality
• Offering choice in your assessment
• Challenges of fairness of equivalencies
and technical support
• QAA project with University of
Manchester, Imperial College London,
and University of York
• Case study: Institute of Education
modules led by Dr Nicole Brown
• Artefacts include video, collage, knitting,
baking, painting, installation
6. New ways of assessing:
Authentic assessment
• Dimensions include real world problems,
require collaboration, self-regulated,
varied audience, peer reviewed
• Case study 1: Physiotherapy module led
by Dr Jane Simmonds
• Case study 2: Health and wellbeing in
cites module led by Dr Gemma Moore
• Partnership approaches, wikis, non-
disposable assessments, employability,
Objective Structured Clinical
Examination (OSCEs)
7. Assessment – a sunny
future?
• Relevance: Personalise assessment, make it useful for a
world beyond assessment, future skills across
programmes. Problem-based. Build AI capability.
• Innovate: More creative ways to demonstrate
knowledge/skills – vivas, videos, eportfolios, technology.
Collaboration and team work.
• Affordances: Fully utilise technology – AR/VR/AI,
simulations and virtual labs
• Feedback: Rethink feedback – peer assessment
• Joy: Of learning, ungrading, engagement, transformative
experience,
8. Resources
• Digital Assessment at UCL blog: https://reflect.ucl.ac.uk/digital-assessment/
• Assessment optionality QAA report: https://www.qaa.ac.uk/membership/collaborative-
enhancement-projects/assessment/optionality-in-assessment
• Designing Authentic assessment: https://reflect.ucl.ac.uk/education-conference-
2022/2022/04/22/designing-authentic-assessment/
• UCL Generative AI hub: https://www.ucl.ac.uk/teaching-learning/generative-ai-hub
• An institutional environment that increases academic integrity:
https://blogs.ucl.ac.uk/digital-education/2022/11/25/an-institutional-environment-that-
increases-academic-integrity/
• How UCL is redesigning assessment for the AI age: https://beta.jisc.ac.uk/member-
stories/how-ucl-is-redesigning-assessment-for-the-ai-age
9. OEB GLOBAL
FRIDAY 24TH NOVEMBER 2023
Thanks!
Marieke Guy (Head of Digital Assessment) m.guy@ucl.ac.uk
Editor's Notes
Title from Jan MacArthur
In case people are unaware UCL is a large and broad institution with over 11 faculties, covering areas from brain science and maths and physical sciences, to social and historical sciences and the built environment. Also countless departments, some of which are research only.
There are almost 45 thousand students, a large number of whom are postgraduate.
We are very much an international institution with over 150 nationalities represented.
All of this means that we are very sensitive to scale and large cohorts and have a lot of assessment instances. We are also still exam and course work heavy, though keen to diversify more in the future.
In the picture you can see Jeremy Bentham, the philosopher who devised the doctrine of utilitarianism, arguing that the ‘greatest happiness of the greatest number is the only right and proper end of government’.
He supported the idea of equal opportunity in education and his ideas contributed to the foundation of University College London in 1826. Bentham left his body to medical science and requested that his body be preserved and gifted to UCL.Today Bentham sits in UCL’s South Cloisters dressed in his own clothes and sitting in his chair
A wicked problem is a concept that originated in the field of social planning and policy. The term was introduced by design theorists Horst Rittel and Melvin Webber in the 1970s. Wicked problems are complex, ambiguous, and difficult to define. They often lack clear boundaries and have numerous interconnected and interdependent factors.