What does the future of digital exams look like? At WISEcon 2019, Professor Mariann Rand-Weaver made a three-fold suggestion.

All digital exam and assessment platforms concern themselves with creating innovative practices which optimise the examination process while simultaneously streamlining the assessment process. But what does the future of digital exams look like? At WISEcon 2019, Professor Mariann Rand-Weaver, Vice-Provost of Education at Brunel University London, made a three-fold suggestion:

1. Continuous development and sharing of new assessment approaches,

2. Working with data analytics and visualisation with a view to improving the examination and assessment processes,

3. Ensuring that assessment practices consistently is kept acquainted with continuous changes to course curricula.

The Basics of Digital Examination

Before exploring the potential of digital exams, the basics of employing and integrating digital platforms at educational institutions is essential to establish. The execution of a digital exam can take place literally anywhere in the world as long as the educational institution provides the following: Training of the students, a venue, WiFi, power, loan laptops, and finally regular laptop health checks (illustrated at the image below). Provided these elements are in place, all the advantages of digital exams can be utilised.

The Future of Digital Exams in Higher Education

“It is not impossible to imagine a future of assessment which is 100% digital.” (Michael O’Sullivan, 2015)

Digital exams are undoubtedly an integrated part of testing and assessing student performance going forward because it is a fundamental part of keeping up with other technological development. These developments affect the curriculum taught at universities and thus also the skills being tested at exams. Furthermore, amongst educational institutions consensus seems to be that what should be tested nowadays is not students’ abilities to access information but rather their abilities to make something out of that information.

Professor Rand-Weaver, among others, is an advocate for experimenting and developing examination forms that facilitates a high level of correspondence between what is taught in class and what is tested and states that she strives to never stick with old forms of examinations simply for the convenience of the familiar. But in which ways are digital examination platforms more prone than paper-pen examination to support the ever-changing curricula at universities?

Obviously, the rapid technological development of the 21st Century aligns directly with using digital assessment platforms since digital skills can almost exclusively be tested through digital media. In Australia for instance, fish identification software coupled with a video and a legal document makes up a digital exam question about determining the legality of fishing at certain longitudes and latitudes. Another example is from Brunel University where students in computer science were tested in their skills of creating creative games in an online forum where they had access to programs such as Excel, Word, PowerPoint, and code editors during the exams.

Along the same line, multiple tests can easily be administered within the same exam when using a digital platform. Thus, digital examinations hold the potential of creating more authentic and innovative examinations than pen-and-paper exams. Moreover, networking and knowledge sharing of exam and assessment practices across universities become easier when they all use the same platform to test and assess.

Another advantage of digital exams is that it easily includes the traditional form of exams as well. Instead of writing an essay in hand a student simply writes it on a computer, or instead of correcting a multiple-choice test in hand an automatic and immediate test result can be revealed. In conclusion, the potential of digital exams beats the pen-and-paper exam by the potentiality of improvement, change, and innovation of the examination and assessment practice.

Data Analytics and Personalised Study Skill Advice

By now this blog has explored the first and third of Professor Rand-Weaver’s prospects for the future of digital examinations, so let us turn to the second: The possibilities of improving the forms and contents of exams by using digital platforms. One way of approaching this is by looking into the data generated during exams. Robyn Fitzharris, a masters student at Brunel University London, gave a presentation at WISEcon 2019 about WISEflow data from the perspective of data analytics. The outset for her presentation was: How can the data generated by WISEflow during exams be used to gain better insight into the examination experience? She suggested multiple aspects of the flows that could be interesting to look at whether students are finishing the exams early, whether marking of exams takes longer on a computer than by hand, or at what time during an exam the students generally write the most.

One focus for Robyn was concerned with explaining student success by examining the correlation between student activity during an exam and the grade the student receives. The data bank used for her analysis consists of data from the Spring exams of 2019 at Brunel covering 26 different flows. A correlation she found was that the number of characters and the grade interact: A pattern where a higher number of characters increases the chance of getting a good grade revealed itself. This finding is not fully explanatory but illustrates how the data generated in WISEflow can be explored meaningfully using the tools of data analytics. According to Robyn Fitzharris, data analytics applied to data generated at digital examinations platforms could ultimately help adjust exams in various relevant ways.

Another way of improving the examination and assessment processes is by providing feedback to students on their performance. Anna Bager-Elsborg, assistant professor at Centre for Teaching and Learning at Aarhus University has in collaboration with WISEflow created an automatic low-cost feedback system that is easily understandable an accessible for students – the results of which she presented at WISEcon 2019. The aim of the project was to enhance student learning and thus also providing students with better skills to do the forthcoming exams and hopefully create better learning experiences.

But how can useful feedback within the framework of a digital assessment system be provided? Based on various scientific insights, Anna developed a framework for measuring study skills that relate to the digital examinations conducted by the individual student. The skills are measured by 3 categories: 1) Understanding or deep learning 2) The level of fragmented knowledge 3) Organisation and planning. Depending on the scores in the various categories’ different kinds of standardised yet personalised advice is given to the individual student, which both relates to the academic performance and the well-being of the student. This innovative feedback system is a great example of how digital examination platforms can be used as a catalyst for enhancement of student learning by offering qualified and educated feedback on student performance and study habits.

Robyn and Anna’s projects are examples of how not only digital examinations are more easily administered and accomplished by using digital platforms, but their ways of optimising the examination practice would not even be possible if the exams were conducted in hand. These projects contribute simultaneously to improving student learning, creating meaningful exam content and exam format, plus streamlining examination and assessment practice. If we have evoked your interest in using, improving, and experimenting with digital examination or assessment our website contains many other interesting blogs about those subjects. For a casual conversation about your institution’s examination practices or a demonstration of our digital examination and assessment platform, WISEflow, we encourage you to contact one of our UNIwise branches in Denmark, Norway, or the UK.