Digital exams have been on the horizon for years. Back in 2020 TeachingTimes looked at the international picture in the early days of Covid restrictions and found that the UK was lagging behind countries such as New Zealand and Egypt.
Revisiting the topic three and a half years later, it is tempting to think that little has changed. Students still sit two sets of high stakes exams - at 16 and 18 - compared to one in other countries. We are still wedded to a one off pen and paper assessment in an examination hall at the end of a course of study. ‘Coronavirus showed that this system was not fit for purpose. In fact, it had just about everything wrong with it: social distancing put paid to examination halls, there was no course work and no prior units banked that could count towards the final grade.’ Progress since then has been glacial.
At the Schools and Academies show in Birmingham in November, Laura McInerney, chief executive of Teacher Tapp, led a roundtable discussion about digital exams and the role that artificial intelligence may play in the near future. The panel consisted of: Colin Hughes, Chief Executive Officer of AQA, Matt Wingfield, Independent E assessor, consultant and Board Member at the eAssessment Association, Sarah Knight, head of Teaching And Learning Transformation at JiSC and Sarah Hughes, head of Research and Thought Leadership in the Digital High Stakes team at Cambridge University Press & Assessment.
Colin Hughes – AQA - generating alternative forms of assessment
‘Are digital exams worth having? Heck yes. Fairness, resilience, speed, cost. They're greener. We released a report not very long ago that emphatically demonstrates that they're going to be greener. But what the students and the teachers and employers like is that they are more in tune with real life.