campusreview . com . au industry & research based on how our students did in those programs , it creates a lot of problems for all the students who take our courses .
Do you think assignments are the answer , or are there other ways to evaluate a program ? An assessment provides some data , but there ’ s a lot of other opportunities . We use things like student evaluation of the program . We can also use peer evaluation .
There ’ s a lot of different pieces to this puzzle of programmatic enhancement , but assessment is a very critical piece . We know that when students engage with the curriculum , the area they place the most value on is assessment . That ’ s where they focus their attention .
Should we go back to in-person exams ? That is the question I think is on so many people ’ s minds . I think it ’ s fine to go back to some version of in-person examinations . My concern is we shouldn ’ t go back to business as usual .
Before the pandemic , there were a lot of concerns around in-person invigilated examinations . Some of them were just practical concerns where , when you have large classes , finding spaces to put all of the students so that you can invigilate an exam .
There ’ s also the issue of whether or not exams are the best assessment to give . We are increasingly focusing on issues like sustainable graduate competencies that students are meant to develop and use for their entire career .
If assessments are the most important area of the curriculum to our students , then probably our assessments should embody those sustainable issues .
How should we redesign assignments and do things differently ? Do we want to replace examinations or do we want to improve them ? Do we want to replace examinations or deemphasise the weight on examinations ? My response would be we need to make well informed choices throughout the entire curriculum to redistribute the weight of the assessment into other forms of tasks that are much more resistant to cheating , like vivas .
Of course , for some courses you can ’ t do that . Professional degree programs often have relationships with external accreditors that demand there be some kind of an invigilated exam-like process .
For those , I recommend thinking about things like developing good open book examination practices . You allow your students to have access to materials during the examination , but you construct the examination in ways that they can ’ t simply look up answers on Google .
This often involves using novel material , like presenting a case to the student that ’ s completely novel and then asking them to pull pieces of the case out and analyse them .
Why do you think students are cheating ? This is a super complex issue . It ’ s such a seminal question and there is no one ready answer . Of course , students do cheat sometimes because they ’ re fully aware that they ’ re not going to do as well if they don ’ t .
But in some cases too , we have students who are coming from different cultural and learning contexts in which rote memorisation and recitation are more highly valued . In those situations , the idea of collaboration or collusion is not necessarily cheating in their minds .
Do you think all students are equal when it comes to assignments ? Simple answer , no . Our students are not equal . The kind of inequalities or inequities we don ’ t want to affect a test score involve things like access to materials . If a student has really terrible bandwidth in the location they ’ re taking an online examination , and they are not able to access materials and resources that another student can , that ’ s the kind of thing we absolutely need to address proactively . Any score difference between those two students doesn ’ t actually reflect a difference in academic achievement , does it ?
We also need to address inequities that relate to differently abled students . I think universities are beginning to do a good job around that by granting people who are differently abled , different forms and ways to take examinations .
We also have to recognise that exams are designed to determine students who have different levels of achievement . And so when we say that some students are coming to an examination with different levels of achievement , then actually that ’ s exactly what an examination is designed to determine . And that ’ s okay from an exam design perspective .
We have to be able to look at the marks we give and say , ‘ I can stand behind these ’
What strategies can universities put into place to address inequality ? I think universities need to put two strategies into place . The first is about student access and student resources . For universities that have examination offices , it ’ s absolutely essential they remain current on what kind of modifications might be needed for students who have different ability levels that we don ’ t want to affect test outputs .
This can be things like visual impairment , physical impairments . It can be all sorts of things that we absolutely do not want to stand in the way of a student ’ s achievement .
The second strategy is evaluation . Universities need to treat examination results as data sets and analyse them and look for patterns that may help us to improve how we engage our students in the long term .
Exams are an absolutely wonderful data set that we keep getting semester after semester . It pains me to think sometimes that universities quickly look at these data sets , assign scores to them , and then just discard them .
There ’ s all sorts of things that we could be doing as institutions concerned with the enterprise of student learning , where we capitalise on what our students do with exams and use that to improve how we engage our students .
How important is it for lecturers to review themselves and the program using those data sets ? I think it ’ s tremendously important , so much so that I think in 10 years ’ time I would be shocked if that were not an almost unspoken expectation . But we have to factor in what that means in terms of workload , because it is a lot of work . It ’ s time and effort well spent , but universities need to make the space and the time , and they need to construct the resources for staff to actually be able to do that .
I am optimistic that universities are increasingly going to understand that academic integrity and good examinations are as much a staff development and resource issue as anything else . ■
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