By Dr Philippe Gentillon and Dr Emily Chandler with Dr Charitha de Silva
With face-to-face exams off the table in Term 2 due to the COVID-19 situation, Dr Charitha de Silva needed to redesign the final assessment in MECH3610 Advanced Thermofluids as an online exam. The uncertain number of remote students working in different countries or time zones raised concerns about people sharing exam answers. However, delivering the exam online also presented an opportunity. With upwards of 250 students in MECH3610 each term, Charitha was keen to streamline marking. Working with Dr Philippe Gentillon from the EDDS team and following student feedback from courses in T1 2020, they came up with a hybrid approach for lessening marking load and supporting students to work with integrity.
First, they used a formative quiz to give students guidance for tackling the assessment. Charitha notes that students “had a good chance to play with the formative quiz … as many times as they want,” getting familiar with the summative exam’s structure and format. Charitha also provided an easy-to-read PDF guide for submitting scanned working solutions for different answers. Charitha scheduled the two-hour exam window for the evening in Sydney, in one of the allocated lecture times. This maximised daylight hours during the exam in most parts of the world. All students, both those studying remotely in Sydney and those offshore, sat the exam under the same time pressures. The limited timeframe mimicked the experience of an exam hall, discouraging students from sharing answers to a large degree. The test also delivered questions randomly so that all students did not all attempt the same suite of questions.
Students read an academic integrity declaration and marked it as 'read' using a checkbox, to ensure there was no misunderstanding of what academic integrity meant in this assessment. When students marked the checkbox, the Moodle Quiz exam opened for them to complete. When students completed the quiz, they uploaded their solutions through Moodle Assignment tools set up individually for each question.
Charitha found that this revamped assessment structure, with its extra supports and accountability checks for students, was “very well received.” He elaborates, “In a class of 250, I probably got only two or three emails during the test with people having some issues. … [Most students] didn’t have a problem because they knew what they were getting as they had completed the formative quiz earlier.” This approach reduced the marking load by roughly 25% or more, as only answers automatically marked as incorrect needed to be fully marked manually. Charitha appreciated being able to check correct answers more quickly “by simply verifying that students had submitted their working out correctly.” For one-on-one training and personalised consultations to improve academic integrity and reduce your own marking workload, contact EDDS through the Educational Solutions consultation form.
Dr Charitha de Silva is a Lecturer in the School of Mechanical and Manufacturing Engineering at the University of New South Wales. His research expertise is in wall-bounded flows, turbulent structure, microfluidics/biofluids and advanced flow diagnostics.
Dr Philippe Gentillon is an Educational Developer in Educational Design and Delivery Services, PVC(E). With more than 10 years of experience in the academia, Philippe is an expert in exam automation, simulations and STACK development.
Dr Emily Chandler is an Educational Developer in Educational Design and Delivery Services, PVC(E). She has a PhD in Media, Film and Theatre and is an Associate Fellow of Advance Higher Education. Emily is passionate about storytelling as pedagogy, accessibility and equity.