Assessment in the time of change
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Assessment in the time of change Marieke Guy, Head of Digital Assessment BETT, Friday 31st march 2023
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Assessment in the time of change
- 1. BETT, FRIDAY 31ST MARCH 2023 Assessment in the time of change Marieke Guy, Head of Digital Assessment m.guy@ucl.ac.uk
- 2. University College London • Disruptive thinking has been the status quo since 1826 • Russell Group institution, 8th in the world • 11 faculties, 60+ departments • 43,800 students, 14,300 employees, 440 undergraduate programmes, 675 postgraduate programmes • 53% international students, 150+ nationalities
- 4. An assessment pre-mortem It is 2035 and despite the take-up of digital assessment, many universities have retained traditional exams. Course work assignments are seen as unreliable due to the dominance of contract cheating. Academics are over worked with all the marking and feedback. Employers are not satisfied with students’ employability skills. What went wrong? What challenges and drivers got us here? Jisc pre-mortem exercise
- 5. What is the purpose of assessment in HE? • “Measuring the extent of student learning” AdvanceHE • Assessment for learning (AFL) “a way to ‘close the gap’ between a learner’s current situation and where they want to be in their learning and achievement” Cambridge Assessment • Assessment for social justice – Jan MacArthur • Assessment determines if a student has achieved their course’s learning outcomes and allows the awarding body to ensure that appropriate standards are being applied rigorously - QAA
- 6. Curveball 1: Covid • Pre-covid predominantly in-person assessments in the ExCeL • Procurement of an assessment platform • First year 1071 exams and assessments successfully delivered remotely to 48,742 candidates (16,901 students) • Integrations with SITS including students with adjustment, flows created by script • New dedicated digital assessment team • Extensive training programme • Faculty engagement and landscape reports
- 8. Post Covid thinking “We must not, ever, go back to old ways of doing things... We propose moving strongly away from traditional exams’ inflexibility towards more authentic... life-relevant tasks that foster self-regulation, present high order cognitive challenges rather than measuring low order thinking skills in a decontextualised way and place as much emphasis on process as on outcome.” Sally Brown and Kay Semble
- 9. Antifragile “Some things benefit from shocks; they thrive and grow when exposed to volatility, randomness, disorder, and stressors and love adventure, risk, and uncertainty. Yet, in spite of the ubiquity of the phenomenon, there is no word for the exact opposite of fragile. Let us call it antifragile. Antifragility is beyond resilience or robustness. The resilient resists shocks and stays the same; the antifragile gets better".
- 10. Are digital assessments bad? • Digital equity • Technology fails • Technology is limited • Personal preference • Academic misconduct At school. From the series "Visions of the Year 2000"
- 11. Curveball 2: Academic Integrity • Symptom of lift and shift approaches • 1 in 6 university students? Approaches: • Assessment design • Assessment support • Technical approaches - lockdown • Better understanding of academic misconduct - focus groups Phill Dawson’s tier list
- 12. Curveball 3: Artificial Intelligence • Challenges and opportunities of AI • The detection arms race • Implications for regulations • Death of the essay • Institutional scoping group • Workshops and support for staff and students • Wider institutional connections and Jisc
- 13. Curveball 3: AI
- 14. Curveball 4: Workload and large cohorts • Large cohorts • Staff workload and fatigue • Our strikes and their strikes • Poor feedback • Lack of clarity and NSS scores • Possibilities for automation and AI feedback e.g. Graide
- 15. Curveball 5: Appropriate assessments • Authentic assessments • Assessments for social justice • Freedom to learn movement – ungrading • Optionality and personalised assessments • Peer assessment • Integrated assessments – programme level assessment • Vivas, portfolios • Student partnerships and co-creation
- 16. Quiz & Poll Video Institutional Departmental File upload Portfolio Group work UCL assessment tools
- 17. Where does this leave us? • We need to remind ourselves what are we trying to achieve • We need to talk about assessment (within our institution and across the sector) • We need to resource assessment and put the work in • No one size fits all and there is no easy solution • We need to involve students in this conversation • We need to be brave and aspirational Blog: https://reflect.ucl.ac.uk/digital-assessment/
- 18. Adjacent possible “The adjacent possible is a kind of shadow future, hovering on the edges of the present state of things, a map of all the ways in which the present can reinvent itself.” Steven Johnson
Editor's Notes
- 11 faculties: Arts & Humanities, Brain Science, Built Environment, Engineering, Laws, Life Sciences, MAPS, Medical Sciences, Population Health sciences, Social and Historical Sciences, IOE Jeremy Bentham - English philosopher, jurist, and social reformer regarded as the founder of modern utilitarianism - “Create all the happiness you are able to create; remove all the misery you are able to remove. Every day will allow you, --will invite you to add something to the pleasure of others, --or to diminish something of their pains.” — 1st in England to welcome students of any religion or social background. — 1st in England to welcome women to university education. — 1st in England to teach English, German, Chemistry, Engineering. — A brave and progressive approach that has continued to this day. — 1st in England to have a fully open access university press.
- Digital equity Not everyone is in the same place when it comes to digital. Some people have much better digital skills, own better devices and have a more stable infrastructure (wifi, space in which to work etc.) This applies to both staff and students. Technology fails As we all know working technology is not a certainty. Hardware, software and networks all fail at some point. Technology is limited A technological solution isn’t always available for existing practices. For example maths requires students to handwrite formula and Optical Character Recognition (OCR) software is limited. Current marking processes for offline assessments may not be easy to replicate in existing platforms that lack maturity. Some prefer offline Using technology can be exhausting for some, especially when carrying out time-consuming activities like marking. There may be health and accessibility reasons for avoiding too much time online. Academic misconduct Being online offers access to digital resources and if the assessment is taking place remotely it is easy to communicate during the assessment with other students. This can result in a high number of academic misconduct cases. Tools like AI and services like essay mills compound the issue.
- research from the Schlesinger Group
- Originally a concept from the biologist Stuart A. Kauffman Also liquid networks, slow hunch, serendipity, error, exaptation, platforms