Assessment methods at top 10 unis - movement away from traditional exams?

[Springflowers1]

Really interested in getting feedback and experiences on this for humanities/social sciences at top unis as DC2 is in yr12 and I think this is something we should be more aware of when evaluating options and comparing unis. For context DC1 is at Oxbridge doing an exam heavy essay subject with very little scope for coursework or other forms of assessment. First 2 years is all very stressful traditional exams and 3rd year is 3/4 traditional exams plus a dissertation or similar. Uni did do 5hr open book exams for a while after covid but reverted back to exam halls due to concerns about cutting and pasting of old essays and use of AI.

First time around I wasn't fully aware that so many other top unis now employed many diverse ways of assessing students and that often the majority of exams were open book eg 24hr ones?

Those of you with DC doing essay subjects at high ranking unis, how have they found these alternative modes of assessment, particularly 24hr open book exams? Does the removal of the need to memorise everything significantly reduce stress levels? It makes alot of sense to me - nothing in the world of work is about memorisation of vast amounts of information, but I know it's not straightforward because of issues with AI.

I only occasionally tutor @CurdinHenry I am asked to do so because of my professional skills and more than happy to pass on my knowledge to students.

Group work around devising an experiment (this was awful as DS was the only one who took it seriously in his group - and his friend in another group did all the work). It was ever thus!

Each student in the group should be required to give a presentation about how the project was conceived and developed and their specific contribution. 5-10 minutes should be enough to sort out who actually did any of the work.

But then I suppose you'd have students saying they can't give presentations because of anxiety.

My ND daughter just had a 24hr exam and did exactly the same - was so wired after being awake 24hrs took another 6hrs to get her to sleep. She gets 25% extra time in exams anyway so wondering if she should ask for this and then would feel comfortable going to sleep during the exam.

I would compare assessment at module level rather than university level. For the compulsory modules in each year, note exams, essays, portfolios, presentations, group work, vivas and dissertation weighting. Also ask whether assessment has changed since AI policies tightened. A course can look 50/50 on paper but feel very different if the exam is a 24-hour open-book task.

I did English Lit at York more than 15 years ago and it was assessment only back then too. Only did one exam and that was for the foreign language module.

I was great at exams at school and I worried I might not be playing to my strengths, but actually I loved it, there was real freedom to follow the topics than interested you for your essays.

That was a long time before AI though. The general perception was if was harder to outright fail, but also harder to get top marks because there was a lot of room to go off on tangents.

Sure but this research points to the longer pieces of writing needing to kick in much earlier in academic training than at PhD level. Indeed, now I think about it, one of our DC's Y6 teacher got the children to write a very extended piece over many weeks and it was a fantastic learning experience that stood them in excellent stead.

Many students do not use AI to cheat, but many do. It is very difficult to come up with an assessment where AI is accessible , in which the students who don’t cheat do better than the ones who do. That is why we go back to closed book assessment.

its not only about assessment either. If students know they can cheat the exam they dont put the same effort into studying throughout the course.

speaking as a lecturer who has had to redesign all my assessments

I am head of an academic department and the number of cheating investigations we are running has exploded due to AI use. The students investigated are nearly all found guilty of academic misconduct. As has been stated above, high ranking universities are moving to AI-proof assessments to protect their reputations. This includes exams on "unseen" material, where students have to apply their knowledge (rather than regurgiate facts as with A levels).

Re. appropriate use of AI vs cheating, any AI use, even when appropriate, is supposed to be declared and screenshots of prompts made available, but we have yet to see anyone declare.

@GCAcademic "This includes exams on "unseen" material, where students have to apply their knowledge (rather than regurgitate facts as with A levels)."

All university courses ought to have this type of examination as an integral part of degree assessment. Obviously the format is highly subject dependent.

What is appropriate use of AI though? I would have assumed using it as a research tool is ok? I have access to a university library and a lot of the online texts are summarised as an addendum to the main body of the text. This is technically AI and clearly endorsed by the university so would reading it have to be declared?

The summaries are really no different to the abstract that most journals already provide - just less accurate as they rely on machine interpretation rather than the author's own summary of their article. As I said, it's things that you've prompted AI to do that should be declared.

In my department (humanities) we don't regard using it as a research tool to be appropriate use, no, because it doesn't have access to a full range of resources and often makes significant errors of interpretation, hallucinates references, etc. It can be useful for helping to structure work, proofread, and critique it. For that reason it can be brilliant for students with specific learning differences, so I am not entirely opposed to it.

Why should they be scrapped, I am genuinely interested.

I firmly believe GCSEs should be scrapped and A levels should be a minimum of 4, 2 humanities subjects 2 STEM. 6th form starts in year 11.

I work in finance and there’s a real problem with graduates not being able to pass their professional exams because they haven’t done rigorous timed exams much at uni.
For me, exams have always been the quickest way to make sure I learn a subject matter well enough to write about it and build on it, which is critical for my job. Not saying I couldn’t have written a long form essay instead- but very glad I didn’t have to. Repeated exposure to multiple timed examples was much better practice for my job.

What makes you think times exams is in any way representative of any real life pressure.

My Dd is at Lancaster doing humanities + mfl and apart from her minor (creative writing) she's got all exams. It's only one a week so spread over a month.

I am from an excellent STEM School, which I originally thought outside the scope of OP’s queries.

Every. Good. University. Is. Grappling. With. AI. Use.

In my discipline, this is primarily amongst UG and weak MSc students. Elements of AI can be properly used for research but it is generally not earth shattering, and although protocols are evolving they are not terribly controversial. For doctoral dissertations, there is generally enough writing history to know that AI has been kept in its place.

A substantial minority of UG and weaker MSc dissertations, produced by students who have not maintained good contact with their supervisors, are very different. AI use is clear, and clearly crosses the line to academic malpractice. Preventing this requires many academics to supervise these students much more intensively than either party prefers. It is true that the viva tends to unmask these students but there is resistance to increasing its weighting, and there are other reasons for blowing it. Students, particularly those who pay extortionate fees and have limited English, cry foul.

I agree with you that the proper use of AI can be a great thing and students should learn how to use it effectively. There is nothing contradictory here.

DD hasn't done exams at all in her four years at Uni. History at Exeter and Medieval History Masters at Oxford, all coursework and/or 24 hour type exams. You could also get extensions if needed which is wild, and almost everyone does.

I agree with you and @Ceramiq that questions or problems on unseen material are important. In recent years our students have begun strongly to protest them and we have come under pressure to minimise their inclusion on our (traditional, timed) exams.

I find this troubling.

@bumptybum there are many jobs/ times in life where you have to think and respond timed under pressure as I mentioned in some of my other posts. But my experience is possibly slightly outside the remit of this debate so I have withdrawn.
I do however stand by the fact that the young (obviously not all) are losing critical thinking skills and confidence in dealing with real world situations

It’s because school exams are now entirely based on mark schemes from old papers. Students expect to get an A star by simply memorising mark schemes without engaging with the wider subject. Even in Maths you don’t see questions that haven’t been asked before.

That's really not true for essay subjects (or the ones I teach anyway). The markschemes are a masterclass in vagueness. There is no content to 'memorise'.

My DC who is just about to graduate has always preferred exams where compounded knowledge and skills need to be applied to unseen material. However, in secondary school I did employ tutors for specific preparation and the acquisition of methodology for this type of exam - an investment that has paid off massively for my DC, but also made us both aware that many British students are not properly trained in methodology for unseen material and get thrown by it. Indeed, my DC even managed to surprise a TF in a tutorial with a structured exposé of how to tackle the exam he was setting ;)

What exactly is unseen material? Excuse a probably stupid question.

Let’s take a simple example from maths.

Children learn that ^prime numbers’ are positive integers having no (positive) factors except themselves and 1. So
2,3,5,7, 11 and 13 are prime. No even number besides 2 is prime, because all larger even numbers have 2 as a factor. 21 is not prime, as 21 = 3 x 7. Children learn this early

For most children the concept of twin primes would be new.

For children of an appropriate age, an unseen problem could be

^Twin primes are pairs of prime numbers having a difference of 2. Examples of twin primes include 5 and 7, 17 and 19, and 29 and 31.

Write down three more pairs of twin primes with all your numbers greater than 10. Verify that all of your numbers are prime.^

The maths is quite routine for children who have been working with prime numbers. What’s being assessed is whether you can make sense of a new concept closely related to what you have been doing, and work with it.

Our students now find the analogies of this problem stressful.

A translation of a text from an author that hasn't been studied (though the period and genre have been). A comparative visual analysis of two works of art that haven't been studied (though the period and/or artists may have been). A close reading (commentary) of a text taken from book or a poem that hasn't been studied.