Monday 10th June 2013 - A vision of future exams

In the departmental office the exams secretary is almost hidden behind piles of marked exam papers.  Over the last three weeks the sight of people carrying bundles of scripts has been commonplace on campus - I've even seen a particularly big load being carried in a shopping trolley. 

I carry a lot of materials around with me, including the 'papers' for meetings, presentations to be given at conferences and other events, the university's business recovery plan for teaching (which I have with me at all times), and various reports.  But none of these is in paper form. They are all files on my iPad or stored on the memory stick I carry in my jacket pocket (suitably backed up to my desktop, of course!).  Meetings papers are kept in an app caleld 'Notability' which even allows me to annotate them on screen and to save the annotations.  All the materials I write are written direct to the screen, not on paper.

Students generally work like that too.  They word process all their essays and assignments.  Some take notes in class on a mobile device or a notebook computer.  Some record the few lectures I give in my option class as audio files.  And yet at the end of the year we expect them to pick up a pen and produce their thoughts via handwriting in an exam lasting 2 or even 3 hours.

When I was an undergraduate it was, of course, very different.  Throughout my second and third years I was expected to produce three full essays every two weeks, handwritten on quarto paper.  I guess they were each about 3500 words long.  They were either read out and commented on in the tutorial, or read by the tutor and handed back at the next class.  No marks from these were ever carried forward into my degree classification which depended entirely on 10 x 3 hour exams plus a dissertation.  We thought little of the mechannics of those exams (although the content bothered us).  We were used to writing with pen and ink on paper.

Isn't it time that we moved on?  Why should students who never do an extended piece of handwriting during the year be expected to do so under exam conditions?  They will probably never do so again in their future careers. Can't we bring exams up to date?  (I will leave on one side the defence of written essay-style exams: I do believe they are a good test of the ability to structure an argument under pressure.)

How about the following as a vision?
When students enter the exam room they sit at a tablet computer.  It has wifi disabled so students are not able to Google material.  They type their answers and at the end of the exam they save their work and leave the room.  Their answers are then retained in a central file on a shared drive to which all the relevant markers have access.  Markers call up essays on screen, read them, and append a file containing feedback and comments.  Second markers or moderators can similarly work from the file version.  Marks can be recorded electronically, particularly if some widget is created to link the essay file to a spreadsheet.  External examiners can have their sample sent to them electronically.  And once the exam board is over students can have their essay, with appended comments, sent back to them electronically. (Befroe anyone points out that some students can tyope faster than others I would point out that some students write faster than others too.)

Apart from bringing exams into the 21st century and aligning them with the ways in which students record information in everyday life, think of the green impact of such a proposal - the tons of paper saved, and the storage cupboards for old exam papers that could be turned to more efficient uses.  How about it?