Assessment in the time of change Marieke Guy, Head of Digital Assessment BETT, Friday 31st march 2023

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

7. A team effort
•Central
Assessment
Team
Assessment
Product
team
Digital
Assessment
Team

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