‘Slick, calm and successful’: University College London runs large-scale in-person digital exam pilot at ExCel London, using WISEflow.
On Wednesday 17 May, University College London students arrived at the ExCel arena, London, to sit their exams.
However, 370 of these students were not sitting paper-based assessments; instead, they had opted to take part in an in-person digital examination pilot, sat on WISEflow with hardware supplied by a third-party provider.
While WISEflow handles large-scale simultaneous examinations without issue during peak exam periods, piloting on-site digital assessments presented a wider challenge for Joanne Moles, Head of Assessment Delivery and Platforms, and the other members of staff running the pilot at the ExCel arena.
With 370 students taking part in digital high stakes end of year exams, the planning team had to be ‘meticulous.’
Major considerations included providing the infrastructure needed to hold the assessments digitally and simultaneously, how to effectively communicate to both staff and students before and after the exams and providing student support throughout.
Furthermore, there was another paper-based assessment taking place at the same time in the adjoining examination hall.
As Marieke Guy, Head of Digital Assessment at UCL, writes: ‘There were 12 modules participating in the pilot covering a variety of different discipline areas (languages and STEM areas). These included languages, biology, immunology, physiology and psychology, with a variety of different assessment types – Multiple choice, fill the gaps and essay based.’ More from Marieke and the UCL planning team can be read here.
Despite the organisational workload, both the digital and paper-based examinations took place without any major issues, and the session was ‘slick, calm and successful.’ Joanne hailed the digital in-person exam pilot as ‘perfectly executed’, thanks to the help of the UCL team.
Students waiting to start their in-person digital exams at the ExCel Arena
We sat down with Joanne after the exams had taken place to discuss the event.
What did you learn from the digital exam pilot?
Joanne: Preparation and readiness is key! Making sure that the logistics are well and truly tied up in terms of things like WiFi and power sources was incredibly important. We also learnt a quick lesson with regards to MFA (Multi Factor Authorisation), which was a small stumbling block on the first day. But, in essence, students turned up, sat down, logged on and got on with it!
Do you see in-person digital exams at larger scale as a viable option for UCL going forward?
Joanne: It’s a viable possibility, but due to the numbers and scale, this would need to be an institutional decision moving forward.
What advice would you give to other institutions that are planning to hold in-person digital exams?
Joanne: Think about the students’ digital readiness and whether their laptops are suitable. If not, what are the contingencies? We went down the route of supplied laptops, which took all the risk away but did mean that students had to remember their passwords as opposed to the device remembering. One of the lessons learned was in terms of foreign language characters for language exams, which took us time to work out and plan – however, on the day, this was not an issue at all. UCL have also run a smaller Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) pilot using the lockdown browser, which offers a useful comparison to this large-scale pilot.
After the pilot, UCL asked for student feedback on the digital in-person exams. Of the 112 that responded:
Over 90% felt that Logging into WISEflow on the day was straightforward
Just under 90% felt that entering the lockdown browser on the day was straightforward
78% felt that they were able to access/view the assignment easily
73% said that typing and submitting their responses was straightforward
Congratulations to UCL, the examination planning team and all involved for such a successful pilot.