COVID-19: Conducting Remote Assessments with Integrity
During the Online EdTechX Summit Arjun Smith, Chief Strategy Officer at Turnitin and CEO and Co-Founder of Gradescope (acquired by Turnitin last year) spoke about the challenges and considerations that should be made in achieving integral remote assessments.
The difficulty in conducting remote assessments with integrity has now become a lot more prevalent during the COVID-19 outbreak. It is unknown when we will see the traditional classroom return and if it will return at the same frequency as before. There are several challenges that come with this. Students will want to continue to have the high quality experience they received in person. It cannot be predicted when it would be possible to achieve this so for the time being, it is vital to support students during this time.
Within the assessment, the challenges arise when you cannot see the students in person. These challenges can be broken down into three parts:
- Digitisation — How do we take our assessments online?
- Accessibility — How do we ensure all students have access?
- Integrity — How do we prevent academic misconduct?
The challenges within digitisation vary, mostly as subjects like maths and music usually require to show working, are handwritten and questions are open ended. With regards to accessibility, one cannot assume that all students will have access to printers, high quality internet and similar devices so the challenge becomes providing an assessment that can take place in a variety of ways.
There are several steps to ensuring the integrity of the assessment. Maintaining the quality and rigour of the exam and successfully retrieving feedback are all to be considered. For example, generating multiple choice answers for math questions removes the opportunity for the student to show their working and hence level of understanding. Furthermore, the assessor can no longer share high quality feedback based on the results. One way to ensure rigour is maintained is to ask an open ended question.
Another challenge is one related to plagiarism and collusion, both of which are significantly easier to achieve in remote assessment. The initial response to this is either to ‘relax’ and trust the student, especially during this unprecedented time. The second is to ensure everything is done securely immediately, whether this is through recordings or other tools. However, these are two extremes of the spectrum. Different responses need different tools and finding the answer for you may fall in the middle of this.
There are different remote assessment tactics to consider. One element to consider is to build authenticity in the assessment. This can be achieved having the student walk through their response as part of the assessment. By either video or audio, the assessor can hear that it is, in fact, the student taking the exam, and the student can show their thought process. There is also the decision on which tools to use during the exam, whether this is focused on security, analysis collusion or plagiarism or a browser lockdown tool. There are certainly multiple different tools that can be used for one example and the challenge there is to ensure not to overwhelm the remote assessment with too many tools and considerations that need to be made for the student. Student support is still to be top of mind during these times.
By understanding how this can be achieved, one needs to understand that workflow and feedback of an assessment. Firstly, there is the creation of the assessment and understanding the goals and relevant resources. In remote assessment specifically, there is also the need to ensure the novelty of the assessment. It is becoming more common that exams are leaked onto the internet and students find the questions and answers beforehand.
After creation, there is delivery and submission. People will have various access to the internet and hardware which means certain tools are necessary to provide a secure environment including browser lockdown tools. They are currently being seen as the most important for submission fixes.
Grading and feedback are also of utmost importance to help communication during remote learning and assessment. Feedback should be rich and actionable, reduce bias and help with the variety of different test forms submitted. Creating an efficient workflow is critical to make grading manageable as students submit assessments through paper or digitally.
Finally, as students and assessors analyse the results, there is the need for self-reflection, short term action, long term course improvement and the ability to investigate misconduct. There is a need for various integrity capabilities including authorship integrity. Challenges in ensuring security or overcoming privacy issues when including proctoring or invigilating options have become paramount during this time. Including this in the additional tools required and workflows, there are a lot of factors that need to be considered at one time.
Turnitin has taken all of these elements and created one cohesive platform, with privacy, security and accessibility at the core. Arjun Singh explained by working with different partners to create this platform they have made it easier for instructors, assessors and students to undergo remote assessment, gain high quality feedback and maintain the integrity of their assessments.
Gradescopes has become available at no cost until the end of 2020, you can contact them directly here. EdTechX Online will be hosting additional events throughout 2020. Interested in finding out more? Register Interest Here
