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Karen Henderson, Rhys Gwynllyw, Alison Hooper
University of the West of England, Bristol, United Kingdom
With increased sophistication and capabilities of e-Assessment systems it would seem that online examinations will become standard practice, particularly for numerate subjects, in the near future. We have gained valuable experience in this area through running online mathematics examinations for over 300 engineering students in January 2015 and January 2016. We used the DEWIS e-Assessment system to run the online examinations.
DEWIS is a fully algorithmic open-source e-Assessment system which was designed and developed at the University of the West of England (UWE). It is a completely stand-alone web based system used for both summative and formative assessments. It was primarily designed for numerate e-assessments and is currently used in the fields of Business, Computer Science, Nursing, Engineering, Mathematics and Statistics. This algorithmic approach enables the separate solution, marking and feedback algorithms to respond dynamically to a student's input and as such can perform intelligent marking. In addition, the DEWIS system is data-lossless, that is, all data relating to every assessment attempt is recorded on the server. This enables the academic to efficiently track how a student or cohort of students has performed on a particular e-Assessment.
One of the major advantages to running exams in this way, as opposed to running a traditional paper-based exercise, is that students are able to receive rapid feedback on their work, because their submissions are marked immediately. It also enables academics to quickly identify those students that are at risk on the module, enabling them to specifically target such students early on in the year, at a point where interventions are likely to yield positive results.
Running the exam in this way for the first time in January 2015, students were initially fearful that this method of assessment would produce lower grades. Comparison of marks between the January on-line exam and the traditional written summer exam show good correlation. Additionally we note that the overall module marks were better for 2014-15 than in the previous year, which we attributed in part to the controlled assessment mid-year. It appears that the on-line exam format is a good indicator of student progress.
Karen Henderson, Associate Head of Department: Mathematics & Statistics, Department of Engineering Design & Mathematics
Rhys Gwynllyw, Senior Lecturer, Department of Engineering Design & Mathematics Alison Hooper, Associate Head of Department: Student Experience,
Department of Engineering Design & Mathematics