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Online Assessment and COVID: Opportunities and Challenges

Published: 14 February 2022 Publication History

Abstract

As higher education moved abruptly online in response to COVID-19, it necessarily swept assessment along with it. Assessment has long been the subject of debate, particularly in the context of ensuring that the people being awarded the grades are those who actually did the work. While some universities have moved away from rigidly authenticated assessment, trusting the students to behave with integrity, others see value in ensuring that they assess the right people. This paper reports on interviews with a dozen leading computing educators in Australia, and finds that the move online brought by the pandemic has highlighted both of these positions. Some academics do indeed trust their students to behave with complete integrity and see no need to supervise or authenticate the students’ submitted work. Others strive to ensure integrity as long as all assessment remains online and unsupervised, and are desperate to return to invigilated formal examinations. We endeavour to find common ground in these positions, and discuss the likelihood of a sustainable future for assessment in computing education.

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Cited By

View all
  • (2024)Diverging assessments: What, Why, and ExperiencesProceedings of the 55th ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education V. 110.1145/3626252.3630832(1161-1167)Online publication date: 7-Mar-2024
  • (2023)Online exams in higher education: Exploring distance learning students' acceptance and satisfactionJournal of Computer Assisted Learning10.1111/jcal.1288840:1(342-359)Online publication date: 3-Oct-2023
  • (2023)Beyond Question Shuffling: Randomization Techniques in Programming Assessment2023 IEEE Frontiers in Education Conference (FIE)10.1109/FIE58773.2023.10342976(1-9)Online publication date: 18-Oct-2023
  • Show More Cited By

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      cover image ACM Other conferences
      ACE '22: Proceedings of the 24th Australasian Computing Education Conference
      February 2022
      200 pages
      ISBN:9781450396431
      DOI:10.1145/3511861
      Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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      Association for Computing Machinery

      New York, NY, United States

      Publication History

      Published: 14 February 2022

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      Author Tags

      1. COVID-19
      2. academic integrity
      3. computing education
      4. online assessment

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      • Research-article
      • Research
      • Refereed limited

      Funding Sources

      • Australian Council of Deans of ICT

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      ACE '22
      ACE '22: Australasian Computing Education Conference
      February 14 - 18, 2022
      Virtual Event, Australia

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      Overall Acceptance Rate 161 of 359 submissions, 45%

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      Cited By

      View all
      • (2024)Diverging assessments: What, Why, and ExperiencesProceedings of the 55th ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education V. 110.1145/3626252.3630832(1161-1167)Online publication date: 7-Mar-2024
      • (2023)Online exams in higher education: Exploring distance learning students' acceptance and satisfactionJournal of Computer Assisted Learning10.1111/jcal.1288840:1(342-359)Online publication date: 3-Oct-2023
      • (2023)Beyond Question Shuffling: Randomization Techniques in Programming Assessment2023 IEEE Frontiers in Education Conference (FIE)10.1109/FIE58773.2023.10342976(1-9)Online publication date: 18-Oct-2023
      • (2023)Student experience of online exams in professional programs: current issues and future trendsDigital Teaching, Learning and Assessment10.1016/B978-0-323-95500-3.00009-2(161-178)Online publication date: 2023
      • (2023)Computing Education Research in AustralasiaPast, Present and Future of Computing Education Research10.1007/978-3-031-25336-2_17(373-394)Online publication date: 5-Jan-2023

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