The Score on Academic Integrity - Kylie Day and Sarah Thorneycroft, University of New England (Australia)

On this episode of The Score, we're speaking with Kylie Day and Sarah Thorneycroft, leaders in the field of design and implementation of online examinations. Kylie Day is the manager of exams and e-assessments at University of New England, in Australia, and Sarah Thorneycroft is the director of digital education at UNE. Due to the length of our discussion, these interviews cover two episodes of “The Score” – episodes 9 and 10.

Episode 9

Kylie Day (07:06):
… if we put our effort towards the student's feelings and attitudes and decisions before the exam ever starts. So, in the same way as a community safety program or a community health program, you would do population-wide communications to talk about the risks involved, expected behavior, alternatives to risky behavior. In the same way that the highway patrol police are not expected to catch every single person who might speed, they have a presence and that serves a purpose to make it risky, to dissuade people from speeding.

Kylie Day (07:49):
But that's not the only thing that one would do if you wanted to reduce say the road toll or the incidents of people breaking the road rules, you would expect to have a community safety program and narrative happening along with that. And when we catch people who might be cheating it's not a good outcome for them, it's not a good outcome for us as an institution.

Kylie Day (10:05):
… we see flexibility and easy flexibility as a key factor in letting students manage their own pressures in ways that allows them to succeed and not have to cheat to do that.

Sarah Thorneycroft (10:17):
That changes the cost benefit analysis.

Kylie Day (10:20):
So, we work with online exam proctoring service where our exams live in our learning management system, but we have highly skilled and trained supervisors who can... They have a view of the students’ screen. They can use software to lock down that student's computer in ways that we ask them to, and they can also watch the student.

Kylie Day (12:01):
And that's the first thing that our faculty said when we started having conversations about flexibility, flexibility is an F word, if I can be cheeky. Students will cheat, and so that's when we talk about design. The assessment needs to be designed in the mode or in the context of the mode that it's held. It should not be that we are just doing paper exams on a web page, it's a whole second order change.

Kylie Day (12:31):
So, the design features might include using a question bank. So you would have just enough. I get a different question one to you. It's still the same topic, same degree of difficulty. But if I say, "Hey, what did you put on question one?" That kind of collaboration will be disrupted because we get different question ones.

Sarah Thorneycroft (15:12):
This is where it's really useful to help people make comparisons between the paper examination paradigm in which somebody is watching them, and often in more embodied ways of walking up and down and patrolling the physical room that people are located in. But we've also discovered, because online the proctor and student relationship is one to one, whereas in an exam hall it's one to many. Yes, that proctor is watching because that's the cultural condition for examinations that we've agreed on regardless of where they're held.

Sarah Thorneycroft (15:49):
But the proctor can actually also provide support in situ, which can be both technical support or general encouragement. And we've had a lot of comments come through student evaluation that actually talk about how helpful and supportive the proctor was. So that's one of the key reasons that we focus on human invigilation, not AI only invigilation, because of that personalized element and the ability to also provide benefits, not just stress and monitoring.

Kathry