Practical ways to re-imagine exams (and other assessments)

September 1, 2021

Are assessments working for you and your students? Would you like to make a change, but you’re not sure how? We have some practical ideas for ways to re-imagine assessments to be more inclusive.

It’s one of the most familiar memories for many university students: a large sports hall, filled with tiny individual tables, pacing invigilators, and the sound of pens scribbling. Exams are often seen as a ‘traditional’ part of the higher education experience, and this can be an argument for why they’re kept as a form of assessment – ‘it’s what we’ve always done.’ Other rationales for using exams include efficiency and perceptions of exams as a ‘fair’ or secure form of measurement.

But are exams really fair? In fact, exams can act as barriers to equitable treatment – often, more than other forms of assessment. Exams may have relocated from sports halls to bedrooms due to Covid-19 but, whether they’re in-person or online, exams still require students to access specific infrastructure over a tightly set period of time. This can have significant equity impacts due to travel, poor internet connections, access to technology, and particular space requirements. And these strict time, place and technology requirements tend to privilege particular types of skills, which may not even relate to the capabilities necessary for meeting the unit outcomes.

When you consider that common equity issues for students can arise from a broad range of personal circumstances – disability; medical and mental health conditions; living in rural, regional or remote areas; socioeconomic status; culture, race and gender difference; language proficiency; age; and care or work commitments – you can begin to see the problems students might face with exams. Is it fair for a rural student with a chronic pain condition to travel hours to the nearest exam centre? Or for a parent caring for a child with special needs to require a quiet space, with no interruptions or distractions, for several hours? And if not, how can we improve these situations?

Frequently, adjustments of time, space, or mode of submission are provided to individual students as a means of addressing these inequities. These can be useful, but also have drawbacks. While we started out with a focus on exams in this project, as we spoke to students and educators we realised that the issues that students can face in exams are often replicated across other types of assessment. Therefore, our thinking has shifted from a focus on exams to assessment more generally. We argue that exams can be valuably re-imagined, either as other forms of assessment or, sparingly, as carefully designed inclusive approaches; not only this, but many other assessments can be re-imagined to be more inclusive, too. A core inclusive principle is that assessment should not disadvantage any student due to personal circumstance.

We’ve put together a framework designed for teachers and teaching teams who are seeking equitable treatment for all students within their assessment. It includes the inclusive development lifecycle, which consists of four practical interlinked phases to help teachers re-imagine their assessments.

At each phase of the lifecycle, a series of considerations help to prompt assessment design decisions; for instance:

Plan for inclusive change: ideas from this phase include consulting with students and accessibility staff, and finding exemplars of inclusive assessment.
Develop assessment tasks: suggestions for this phase include anticipating common assessment adjustments, and locating the assessment within a broader unit or program context.
Implement assessment: during this phase, considerations include communicating with assessment stakeholders, and monitoring for continuous improvement.
Evaluate and reflect: ideas from this phase include considering student experiences, and sharing successes.

For more great ideas on how to re-imagine your assessment to be more equitable and inclusive, including real-world examples of how educators have re-imagined their assessments, check out our Inclusive Assessment Design Framework, and visit our Resources page for additional materials.