The Future of Education: Digital Examinations

The COVID-19 pandemic brought massive change to the education sector globally with technology at the center. During the lockdown in spring 2020, governments in UK, US, Austria, Australia, Italy, Scandinavia pushed through a switch to online teaching at all educational levels. The speed of change was bound to cause problems for teachers, parents and students, but generally it allowed for teaching to continue during the pandemic.

Exams suffered a different fate. In 2020 and 2021 most governments have cancelled national exams for primary and secondary education to replace these with teacher given grades. Teachers, parents, educators, employers and students protest. Without exams, fairness in the evaluation of student abilities is too easily compromised.

Governments do not have the liberty to experiment to find solutions to the problems of exams in a pandemic. Universities, however, do.

In 2020, dealing with the first wave of the pandemic, leading European, US and Australian universities abandoned traditional, high stakes, quality assured examinations and moved to continuous, low stakes, teacher marked assessments. Universities had already since the 1990’ies adopted teaching and learning technologies and these were familiar to staff and students when the pandemic hit. Most universities redesigned their exam papers to suit a low…