Assessment away day

From time to time, the School has an away day. They tend to have a theme; this time it was assessment. There were some big questions we had with regards to assessment. And most of them had something to do with AI.

One question was: how would we do exams in the near future? The University has been trying to steer away from exams for a while, but we still have a fair few. And during the pandemic, these, of course, all had to be done online. And that means you don't have control over the situation. Students could work together, or Google the answers, or, these days, use AI to generate answers. So what are we trying to do with exams? Should we have exams? Should we have them online, and make sure that neither google nor AI can give you the answers? Should we go back to in-person exams, all old-fashioned in a hall with pen and paper?

The same, really, holds for coursework. Students have, of course, always been able to either work together or use Google, but with AI now on the scene things have changed. We will have to make sure our coursework is such that maybe AI can be a tool, but not the entity who actually does the assignment.

We also had to think about what to tell the students. Don't use AI? Only use AI if it is specified you can do so? But how can we prove it if they do it outside these conditions? Should we teach them how to use it smartly? Are we really the people to do that? So many questions!

We also have a new tool: Power BI. It basically is just a way of quickly visually representing data. But it is quite flexible, and we can use it to help us learn more about assessment in general. It will help us see if there are clashing deadlines, for instance. But it is linked to all sorts of other data, so we can see what sort of assessments the students ask for extensions for the most. (It turns out: the ones that count heavy. It looks like the students will just get the small assessments out of the way, and then ask for an extension for the big piece of work.) It can show us if particular types of assessment score higher grades than others. Or whether maybe there is a trend through the semester. Any questions like that! Before power BI, this would be a lot of work to find out. Now it is a lot easier. So we can use that to our advantage!

And with all these questions and other issues, we filled a day in M-Sparc. I think it was a useful day! And it is not as if just one day was enough to answer all the questions, but at least we have now made a start of thinking about it all together. We'll see how different our assessment will be in the coming academic year!

The view from our space in M-Sparc