Hello Reykjavik

I just arrived in Reykjavik for a conference on PISA 2006 and the transition to e-assessment. It's my first time in Iceland, and I must say it was a bit surreal. I'm just reading Green Mars by Kim Stanley Robinson, which contains a lot of descriptions of a newly terraformed Mars: cold, lots of rocks and lots of lichen. Trust me, walking around in Iceland came scarily close to how I had been imagining the novel in my head up till then.

I'm hoping to find some time over the next days to post my thoughts on the conference. There is a very impressive lineup of international speakers scheduled to speak, and i am looking forward to exchanging ideas and opinions with them. Pictures will have to wait I'm afraid, as I forgot to pack the cable that connects my camera to my laptop...grrr...

Towards a research agenda on computer-based assessment

At the EU workshop I attended in Ispra, Italy last year (see blogposts Psychometrics versus pedagogy and High stakes national assessments and ranking) we agreed to write some articles on quality aspects of computer based assessments to go towards a report for the European Commission. I'm glad to say that the report has now been published, and can be accessed online via the following link: Towards a research agenda on computer-based assessment

I think there's many interesting articles and views within the report, and I will certainly be reviewing the interesting perspectives that my colleagues presented at the workshop in this report. Do have a look, I am positive there will be something of interest there for virtually anyone.

Review: Classmarker

As we're in the middle of a review of the tools we use in support of assessment, I thought I'd share my analysis of the various tools that we come across. As today is a Sunday, we'll start off with a simple one:

Classmarker
Classmarker is an online quizmaker that offers free quizzes (supported by advertisement) with upgrades (including removing the advertisement) for an additional fee.
Type: online service
Cost: Free with paid upgrades
Features: Multiple choice quiz, free text quiz or punctuation quiz.
Interoperability: None
System requirements: Any browser

The first thing I notice when registering, is that the UK doesn't exist, although the 4 home nations do. A more serious point to note, as with many online services, is that all content (and so that includes all personal information, questions and results) will be the property of Classmarker.

The features of this service are extremely limited. While the Classmarker supports 3 question types, it only allows you to use one of those per test. Options such as randomisation, feedback and branding are all features you will have to pay for. There seems to be no way to import or export your questions.

The site seems to be built mainly around Google Adsense. The advertisement and a Google search box is present on every possible page, and that will include the ones your learners visit. Upgrading to get rid of the advertisements costs $24.95 (or 49.95 for a business account, whatever that means). But then your users will still ave to register with the service before being able to take the test. Allowing for unregistered learners to take a test will cost you $0.10 or more per learner. Not really value for money given the incredibly limited features that are on offer.

Conclusion: I really can't see anything of value here. If you need something that is hosted for you, most survey services offer you more functionality. If you have your own space to host your assessments, even the simpler tools available wil offer more then Clasmarker.


Apologies to have to start of with such a negative review. I just stumbled across this tool today, and I thought I might as well write this up now. Do let me know if you have any comments, or perhaps sugestions for other tools I could review.

SAT troubles

There's been a lot of upheaval this week about SAT tests. After a report published by the Children, Schools and Family committee of the House of Commons, MPs warn that national Sats tests distort education, which then lead to the schools minister defending the Sats, followed by technical difficulties with the tests. Personally I am not convinced the tests are really the problem.

One of the keynotes at the Blackboard Europe 2008 conference was given by Andreas Schleicher, the director of the PISA program for the OECD. He presented a very compelling set of ideas around successful (secondary) educations. Some of the conditions he identified (and all of these are based on the data gathered by the programme over the past years) are:

• No stratification. Education systems that have separate streams, schools and or qualifications for learners based on their performance tend to do poorly. An example of this is the Dutch system, where secondary education is stratified over VMBO, HAVO and VWO based on a learners performance in primary school. The British system actually comes out quite well here (if we ignore the stratification that takes place because of the divide between private and public schools that is).
• Standards. It is important to work to common standards. Central examinations are one way of enforcing common standards, and so the SAT tests do satisfy this condition.
• Autonomy. It is crucial for schools and teachers to have a high degree of autonomy as long as their performance raises no concerns. Here we obviously fail completely as the British system dictates how schools teach and assess to a very high degree.
• High Expectations, challenge and support. Both for teachers and learners, education should provide challenge, the expectation of high performance, but also plenty of support (staff development for instance). I think this is another area in which we fail to deliver.

Our main problem lies in the area of autonomy. We no longer trust our teachers and schools do do what they do best based on their professional judgments. In stead there is this weird notion that education is better served by central generic judgments made by policymakers. The problem with SATs isn't that they provide a common high stakes benchmark for learners. The problem is that this information is abused for public league tables and the like, which inevitably leads to pressures on learners that have nothing to do with their personal learning. It's the same pressures that lead to Universities coercing students into filling out the national student survey more favorably.

In Finland schools have no idea about their performance related to their neighbors. Funny enough in Finland it doesn't really make a difference. Only 4% of the variance in scores on the PISA tests can be assigned to the difference in quality between schools. Finnish schools have around 9 applicants for every position offered, and this is not because of higher salaries or anything like that. It is because the system in Finland provides a challenging environment in which people are valued, can grow and develop and actually make a difference.

Blackboard world Europe 2008 (2): Assignment submission

Right then, some more from the past Blackboard conference, as promised...

I attended 2 very interesting talks around a building block developed for Sheffield Hallam University called: 'The Assignment Handler'. It is basically an extention of the gradebook functionallity that already exists within Blackboard.

Sheffield Hallam have decided on a policy that all grades should be fed back to students in a central place, together with feedback. The central place they chose was the Blackboard gradebook. To do that they implemented the following features:

• A transparent and consistent handling of online exams, online submitted exams and exams submitted through the assignment handling office. All these can be set on Bb, submission is logged on Bb, and results and feedback are published through bb. this creates a central place where student process can be comprehensively managed (by staff and students)
• Some bulk-upload and download functionality. Assignments are renamed using module codes and student numbers. Feedback and marks can be uploaded in a single archive, which is useful with larger cohorts.
  
• The option to withold a mark until the student has reflected on, and responded to, the feedback provided. The University is now researching to what extend this actually motivates students to engage genuinely with their feedback.
• Generation of confirmation e-mails as receipts of submission
• Support for group assignments
  

As we have just started to look into a structural sollution around online submission ourselves, this presentation was brilliantly timed. There was a lot of mumbling in the audience on the non-responsiveness from Blackboard on this issue, as many institutions have requested functionality like this before. and in all fairness, most of it is pretty generic and sensible and should probably have been part of the core product for years. In stead it is now a buildingblock that Blackboard will most likely charge us a nice extra fee for.

Marking free text

One of the frequent criticisms on e-Assessment is the perceived limits in item types that can be supported by technology. While there are long debates to be had about assessing higher order skills with constrained response item types, I don't think these debates are going to take away the prime concern: Free text items.

I must say that I have serious doubts about marking free text by computer. I don't know enough about the principles involved to say this with any sort of authority, but I am aware of the kind of heuristics used in automated essay marking for instance. These heuristics are often grammatical and rhetorical in nature, and have fairly little to do with the subject matter (although it must be said that many human markers have been shown to use similar heuristics). Nevertheless, interesting progress is being made in this area, and eventually I am sure that language processing will be commonplace.

One of the interesting project that I recently became aware of, is the OpenComment project, which is lead by Denise Whitelock at the Open University. The project is looking to use latent semantic analysis to analyse learners responses to open ended questions in history and philosophy. Another interesting fact is that the project is developing this as a question type in Moodle, and so it should be relatively easy for everyone to reap the benefits of this technology within their own learning environments.

Automated marking is by no means the only value of using technology in assessment. The OpenMentor project, again from the Open University, is a great example. OpenMentor compares a mark assigned to a piece of work to the amounts of positive and negative feedback given, and checks this for consistency. In this way it can help in the coaching process of new teachers. Given the importance of feedback, I think it's wonderful to have explicit standards and training in giving it.

The ABC (Assess By Computer) software has so far escaped my radar. I wasn't aware of it until queried by the Times Higher Education for the article they were doing. The software has a support role similar to OpenMentor, but this time the support is provided around the marking process. The software can highlight keywords, compare answers to model answers and more. All of this for the sole purpose of making it easier on the human marker, but also improve consistency between human markers. Especially the latter is very welcome I think, as marking open ended questions and assignments can sometimes be somewhat of a dark art.

I only just discovered that bits of the e-mail I sent to the reporter actually appear in the article. If I would have known that I probably would have paid a bit more attention to my grammar :S

e-Assessment centre for the South-West?

Last Thursday I attended a conference / workshop that was exploring the business case of setting up an e-Assessment centre in the South West of England. The conference was organised by Dr. Kevin Hapeshi from the University of Gloustershire with talks from Denise Whitelock (always inspiring) and myself. I must say my presentation skills are somewhat out fo practice, and I coudl have probably done with reviewing the art of speaking.

The day took an unexpected turn during the afternoon sessions, where we were going to discuss the details of a regional e-assessment centre. Both work groups came to the surprising conclusion that perhaps this was actually not such a good idea after all. There are plenty of challenges that we need to face in this domain, but none of them really benefit from a regional approach.

The biggest challenge is the development of mature tools, standards and practice. I've blogged about this in the past ( see Standards in assessment, Open Source Assessment tools, The ideal assessment engine). This is not a challenge we can face as universities, or regions however, it is something that requires (inter-) national collaboration. Many of the other challenges are institutional. They revolve around generating awareness and changing culture and practice. This is not something you can do from the outside. We find it hard to change practice on other other campuses of the University. Changing practice requires a proximity to practitioners, and to the learning and teaching strategies and strategic stakeholders. I don't think that proximity is something you can achieve with a regional (and thus external) centre.

There are of course hybrid models, whereby Universities could collaborate in virtual networks, nominating and funding members of their own staff to work in and with the centre. but this might just all become a rather artificial model tailored mostly towards fitting the proposed solution, and not the problem.

Standards in assessment

The attempts to define standards for computer based assessments have so far been largely unsuccessful. I think that one of the problems is the lack of clarity in the functional domain. Do we really understand the ontology of an assessment, and a question? I don't really think we do, and perhaps we never will. It is easy enough to find a way to define a multiple choice question in XML, but to do the same for 'any' question... I think it's a bit much to ask. You inevitable end up constraining what you can do.

This was one of the main problems with IMS QTI 1.2. The specification was incredibly limited, and thus any systems supporting the standard by definition were as limited. Worse, most systems did not even implement the standard fully, or correctly, and so QTI 1.2 never really got anywhere.

Version 2 was supposed to solve this. The specification (currently still a draft, version 2.1) is indeed a lot better, and allows for much more questions types, feedback, and scoring strategies. The problem is that to make all this possible in a standard XML definition, the specification has gotten rather complicated. I'm not sure it is a viable proposition to expect any vendor to support the standard in full. To make matters worse, all the big vendors, but also the Open University's OpenLearn, seem to be pushing the Common Cartridge, which includes an amended version of IMS QTI. 1.2. While it would be nice to be able to exchange and run questions that are embedded in learning materials from Blackboard or Moodle, it it does strike me as very unlikely that any vendor will now have a serious incentive to support anything beyond the Common Cartridge.

And so we might have to live with the fact that we are not going to have any standard for the exchange of question and/or assessment information. I'm not sure that s a bad thing though. We would probably be better of designing a decent system first, in stead of trying to standardise functionality that hasn't even been implemented anywhere yet. What use is interoperability, if there isn't anything to exchange?

Open Source Assessment tools

I attended a JISC - CETIS workshop today discussing the latest set of Open Source assessment tools that JISC has commissioned. The triads of projects is to deliver Authoring, item banking and delivery tools based on the IMS QTI 2.1 standard. For more information on the individual projects, they are:

• AQuRate (The authoring tool, developed by Kingston University)
• Minibix (The item banking tool, developed by Cambridge University)
• ASDEL (The delivery engine, developed by Southampton University)

While I applaud the 3 project teams for the work that they have done, I must also say that I was concerned.

There have been a lot of projects funded by the sector that were supposed to kick start the development and uptake of standards-based e-assessment. Projects like TOIA, APIS, R2Q2. None of these project ever became much more then a proof of concept. The current set of projects seems to be on course to be heading that same way. None of these projects ever have the institutional backing of a stakeholder that understands the long term business need for such a solution. In stead they are research bids by researchers and developers who's only mandate is to fulfill the requirements of the project plan, and who's only resources are those granted by, in this case, JISC. And so after the kick start the project dies, as the funding dries up.

Are we then forever in the hands of the commercial vendors? I certainly hope not, as so far they have been completely unable to impress me with their products. Most commercial tools offer little of the pedagogical affordances and support that they should be giving and are often even technically rather weak. I deeply believe that the only serious hope that we have in ever getting a valuable and usable set of assessment tools is by collaboratively developing them ourselves. Unfortunately the success that Moodle has become in the world of VLE's seems unlikely to be repeated in the area of e-Assessment anytime soon.

Ideas anyone?

Peer Assessment project: WebPA

One topic that I'm very interested in, both from a pedagogical perspective as a workload management one, is peer review and peer marking. I was therefor delighted when I was asked to be involved with the WebPA project at Loughborough University. The WebPA project is building a tool to support peer marking of group assignments. The system has been used with great succes in Loughborough for many years, and the project aims to make the tool available as an open source solution that can be implemented at other Universities.

We have just held our first workshop in the University of Derby, preparing for a pilot roll out later this semester. For those interested however, there is also a workshop running in Loughborough on the 5th of March. If you are interested in peer assessment, then I would thoroughly recommend that.

Psychometrics versus pedagogy

One of the things I noticed during the workshop I attended last week, is the fundamental differences to the approach of computer based assessment between psychometrists and educators. it all boils down to the use and value of statistics.

I think within education we often don't evaluate our teaching and assessment practice enough, in particular by means of objective standards. For assessment practice the most well known methods of scientific evaluation are Classical Test Theory and, most importantly, Item Response Theory. I don't think many educators really bother with these, and some will stare very blankly should I ever bring up these terms in conversation. In stead we rely on our 6th pedagogic sense that rather mysteriously enables us to divine what assessment methods and questions work, and which do not.

The psychometric approach is radically different. Almost religiously sometimes, items are tested and analyzed using IRT. the most meticulous detail (question order, item order, delivery medium etc.) is reviewed for it's influence on responses. These statistical analysis only focus on one thing though, and that is the alignment of the item with the overall test. What the church of IRT seems to sometimes forget however, is to question whether or not the test in itself actually measures what it is assumed to measure. To a degree IRT is a bit of a circle argument, if not used carefully and in conjunction with other arguments.

It seems to me we could both do with a bit of each others zeal. Educators should really try and build in some structured objective evaluation of their assessment practices, and psychometrists should perhaps question the appropriateness of their means more fundamentally.

High stake national assessments and ranking

It's been a long day full of many, many presentations. Fortunately the last presentation was actually one of the more interesting ones, and I did not have to fight off the embarrassment of falling asleep too hard. It was a presentation by Jakob Wandall from Skolestyrelsen.
about the new national computer based assessments in secondary education that have been introduced in Denmark.

While the technical side of this was interesting (they were using computer adaptive testing for instance), the most interesting bit of the talk had nothing to do with technology at all. It had to do with how the test was used, presented used and regulated.

In England, high stakes tests are a very big deal. The main reason is that they are always is that they are inevitable translated into rankings and funding consequences, leading to teachers and school becoming completely obsessed with assessments, drilling students until they are green in the face in the idle expectation it might raise the school a place or 2 in the oh so important regional league tables. It is this abomination that I think the Danish have elegantly addressed (apparently with the English system as the example of what they wanted to avoid at all costs, and understandably so!)

The publication of the results of these national benchmarks is strictly regulated. The national average is published and used for policy purposes, but no regional or individual result is public. Teachers can review all results of all their students, and even responses to individual questions, but are forbidden to communicate these results other then to the student and their parents (and this communication is not in the form of a grade, but of a textual report with feedback). Students have to be given their result by a qualified teacher that discusses the results and provides relevant feedback on the performance.

So it is impossible for a school, a local authority or the press, to rate and rank scores just on the numerical outcomes of a single test. It provides stakeholders on every level with the relevant information, without the detrimental effects of publication that we see in the US and UK. I think we've got a lot to learn from the Scandinavian approach to education

The ideal assessment engine

I've been looking into criteria for assessment technologies a lot lately. One reason is that we are looking into migrating our current system to a new platform (as the old one, Authorware, is no longer supported). The other reason is that I have been invited by the Joint Research Centre to take part in a workshop on quality criteria for computer based assessments. I will be posting on the outcomes of that workshop next week. For now though, here are some of my thoughts on the topic.

Flexibility
The main strength of our current system is flexibility. This has several aspects, that are all important in their own right:

• Flexibility in design: The layout of the question can be modified as desired, using media and such to create an authentic and relevant presentation
• Flexible interactions: There is no point in systems that have parameterized 5 question types for you, and all you can do is define a title, question text, alternatives and select the right answer. Interactions testing and supporting higher order skills are, or should be, more complex then that.
• Detailed and partial scoring: A discriminating question does not just tell you whether you were completely right, or completely wrong. It can tell you the degree to which you were right, and what elements of your answer had any value. It might also penalize you for serious and fundamental mistakes.
• Detailed feedback: A lot of mistakes learners make are predictable. If we allow assessment systems to capture these mistakes and give targeted feedback, learners can practice their skills while lecturers can focus there time on more in depth problems that require their personal engagement.
  
• Extensive question generation and randomization options: For the re-usability of assessments, generating questions using rules and algorithms given a single question almost infinite re usability. On the assessment level, the same is true for assessment generation based on large banks with questions tagged with subject matter and difficulty.

So far, no real news for TRIADS users (although no proprietary system I know of really supports this well).

Questions without assessments
As Dylan Wiliam so eloquently worded at the ALT-C conference (you can find his podcast on the matter on http://www.dylanwiliam.net/), the main value in learning technology lies in "to allow teachers to make real-time instructional decisions, thus increasing student engagement in learning, and the responsiveness of instruction to student needs." I could not agree more. However, this means that questions should not just exist within the assessment, but instead be embedded within the materials and activities. Questions become widgets that can of course still function within an assessment, but also work on their own without loosing the ability to record and respond to interaction. This, as far as I'm aware, is unchartered territory for assessment systems. Territory that we hope to explore in the next iteration of our assessment engine.

e-APEL article in Response

The new online journal Response has published a 'work in progress' report I wrote on the e-APEL project that I'm involved in. I'm afraid it is rather dated, as the journal took more then 8 months to actually publish this version. Still, for those interested in the accreditation of prior learning, or IT projects in education in general, it might be a worthwhile read.

FREMA

At a JISC meeting this Thursday I was reminded of the FREMA project. I had been aware of their attempts to map the domain of e-Assessment for a number of years now, but I was not aware of some recent developments. Most interesting to me was their use of a semantic wiki. I had never heard of the concept in all honesty, but I found the idea fascinating. In particular for the purpose of Knowledge management and dissemination I think the possibilities here are truly significant.

for the FREMA project in particular, one of the things they were able to do as a result of using this technology, is a gap analysis of their understanding of the domain, but also of the available solutions within the domain. Unfortunately there are still quite a few gaps to be filled in the area of e-assessment, but at least through resources like these we can maximize our efficiency in finding existing solutions, and focusing our efforts on those gaps where the needs are most pressing.

Simple tools

It's not about the technology. We often say it, but we rarely really mean it I think. Let's be fair now: Technology is kinda fun. I know I get carried away far to easily with new shiny things. But sometimes I forget that not everyone is paid to play with new shiny things. Some of us actually have to teach students on a regular basis. So for those colleagues, here's some lovely simple tools that I think can give you a lot of bang for just a little investment.

Course Genie
Course Genie is a lovely tool. It allows you to create nice looking materials and quizzes without any skills other then MS Word. It's a great tool if you want to develop something slightly more interactive then just uploading a module specification or PowerPoint to you VLE, and it integrates nicely with Moodle, WebCT and Blackboard. The quiz options are relatively simple, but actually have some powerful capabilities such as rich feedback based on answers given. The downside is that Course Genie does not save answers, scores, or track progress

QUIA
God knows who thought up the name for this one. In all honesty, QUIA would not be a tool that I'd use myself. it does a lot of things (games, quizes, surveys), but it does none of them very well. Nevertheless if you want a cheap tool that instantly will allow you to create a lot of simple interactive resources this might be the tool for you. The absolute plus to QUIA is that you instantly tap in to the whole QUIA community, which allows you to share and rate all developed materials. QUIA also has a very decent result tracking option, which even allows you to expert a detailed result analysis to Excel.

Electronic Voting Systems
A great way to make teaching, especially in larger groups, more interactive. It's a great way to find out what students think, understand or want during your lesson, so that you can adapt to their needs in the appropriate manner. We've been using Turning Point for a short while now, and so far I am quite impressed. It's extremely easy to set up a simple poll supported by PowerPoint. it is however also possible to much more complex thing, such as linking in responses to demographics.

Essays and plagiarism

I have often questioned the prejudice a lot of academics have in favor of essays, and against a lot of other means to assess learners. Perhaps this is a matter of how they were taught and assessed themselves. One the other hand I have often thought that this is a matter of a lack of training. After all, most lecturers do not get that much training in how assessment should be done properly. In addition most lecturers don't have much time to spend on the assessment either. The result is an assignment that is easy to develop (although a lot harder to mark). Either way, this prejudice is one of the major barriers to the uptake of e-assessment. It is also a serious cause for concern about the validity of our degrees.

So it was with some curiosity and expectations that I started reading It’s not plagiarism, it’s an easy essay on the Learn Online blog, where an interview was posted with a provider of an online essay writing service. I thought it was rather appalling.

As mentioned, I'm no fan of essays. They are certainly overrated, overused and usually very poorly delivered. However I do not think they are useless. Someone's critical thinking is rather wasted if it isn't combined with the ability to express that thinking. If the learner has any sort of ambition to climb the corporate (or other) ladder, writing reports and proposals will be something they do regularly. So as long as essay assignments are given some sort of relevant subject and format, I think they are a very valid form of assessment.

The limited value of essays however does not validate the existence of services like this however. I don't care how the service providers attempt to rationalize this, as is done in this article. It is just morally wrong to provide a service that is obviously designed to let people cheat. The audacity to claim that the objective here is to transform education baffles me. If you really want to change education, I could think of a million other and better ways of doing it then by making money out of helping people cheat. I have no respect for anyone in this line of business whatsoever.

CAA Conference, Loughborough

I just returned from our annual visit to Lougborough for the CAA conference. It was good to catch up again with colleagues from the UK and abroad. It's always interesting to see themes emerging from amongst the vast number of interesting papers and sessions. It however also worrying how some things seem to change very little over time. I think it was Denise Whitelock from the OU who rightfully pleaded for the education sector to grab control of e-assessment. Because there still aren't any good assessment systems. The commercial systems in general are pedagogically poor, and the HE sector seems to have a very difficult time producing anything beyond prototypes, or very discipline specific an narrow innovations. Nevertheless, there are lots of interesting things happening.

CAA and language

There has been a lot of activity in the use of advanced technology to support languages. We have briefly looked at the use of speech recognition and text to speech technology to support ESOL this year, and so I was very happy to see similar interests and developments in various other places. Xin Yu and John Lowe from the University of Bath are investigation the use of recorded audio and video in the assessment of spoken English in several Universities in China, where apparently a basic mastery of English is a mandatory part of the curriculum for all degree programs. Cambridge Examinations presented their new online assessment environment, but I must say that pedagogically I found little of interest there. The solutions main focus is to cope with the almost industrial scale on which they assess students. What did sound interesting was the research done by the University of East Anglia, the SQA and the RNID to use avatar signing in assessment. The avatars used are quite advanced, in order to accommodate for the rich set of expressions they need to properly convey sign language. I would be really interesting to see if we can use these avatars in our own developments in the ESOL domain.

Facilitation of marking and reflection

Another interesting development is the increased use of technology in support of reflective processes, such as evaluation and peer review. I think e-assessment has suffered greatly by the association with MCQ quizzes, and so it is good to see that there are a lot of people waking up to the realisation that the value of technology is not (necessarily) automation. In fact I would say that these types of facilitation are usually more innovative and transformative then the common automation of existing practice. This was also confirmed by Bobby Elliot from the SQA, who referred to this practice as assessment 1.5 (as opposed to assessment 2.0 .. and we all want everything to be 2.0 these days of course).

Student complaints

I had a chat with a colleague last week, as I was looking for some feedback on the e-assessment she had run this year. She told me about this student complaint, and how it was handled. In all honesty I still can't quite believe we can be this stupid.

Some of our lecturers are experimenting with feedback during summative exams. This means learners immediately know whether they answered a question right of wrong, and sometimes why. It also allows them to instantly view their result at the end of the exam. So far, results from the experiment have been quite good (except for learners who really haven't mastered any of the subject matter, who obviously get rather depressed by this whole affair).

A student that had previously taken part in one of these experimental exams, was now taking part in a regular exam; no feedback and no immediate score. The lecturer, as usual, had received the transcripts from us and, after a possible moderation, had published these to the learners. This learner however was apparently convinced that the lecturer had fiddled with the results. Why else would they not have published the results upon the exam finishing? Apparently the student made quite a scene, upon which the programme leader decided to adhere to the students demands and make the exam available again for his perusal for another week. He was then also granted a resit. I really don't understand the problem here.

Let's look at a normal exam. When you hand in the paper, do you get an immediate result? No, of course you don't; a lecturer takes it away, marks it, maybe a colleague moderates it, and the mark is published. It's the lecturer's job to fiddle with the results, that's what we are paying them for isn't it? They look at the answers provided, and make a judgment on the extent to which they satisfy the assessment criteria? Introducing (partial) marking by a computer can only make this process more objective, not less!

It's no wonder lecturers and teachers sometimes complain about the lack of respect learners give them. Because this isn't just about caving in to a student and giving them their way. This also sends a message that this lecturer was wrong. It sends the message that it is the lecturer who has to cater to the students every whim, as she has now been instructed to do. I understand this lecturer will not be teaching here next year, and if this story is true, I can understand why.

Plagiarism

This article in the New York Times caught my eye this evening. Not the smartest thing to do when you're a superintendent, to copy your speech of the internet. Then again, I feel we do sometimes loose perspective in these issues.

Only very rarely in our lives do we manage to be original. And in fact more often then not when we are, we are not as right or as effective as we could be. Perfection after all takes time, practice and experience. Our whole success as a species stems from our ability to copy each other.

So is it so bad to plagiarize? Sure, it is wrong to claim credit or ownership for something that is not your own. But when you are doing your job, isn't it perfectly normal to apply existing best practice to that job. In fact, aren't we all expected to do this? When doing this, we are not claiming ownership, or credit. We are merely utilizing the collective experience of our race to further our cause. In my opinion, that's the only thing this superintendent is really guilty of. Ok, maybe she could have made a bit more of an effort to rephrase some of the ideas and concepts she collected from the internet. Plagiarism however, is really not the issue here though, that is just taking things a tad too far.