ON THE VIRTUAL CAMPUS THE DEGREE MUST STILL BE REAL

EXAMINATIONS IN THE MODERN WORLD.

Presented by Rex Wilton at the

International Congress on Knowledge Society, Economy and Education

at Girne American University, March 2005

Full Text of the Paper

The purpose of this paper is not to present some elegant research project but to pose some questions. I start from a profound belief, based on more than forty years in the examining field, the last twenty on an international basis, that we face a seismic shift in the whole basis of academic assessment. Furthermore I believe that we have not, as yet, begun to recognise or to deal with the magnitude of that tectonic event.

More of that a little later but first some material for review.

We used to think of the virtual campus as separate from the mainstream of traditional education. In the E-world of the 21^st century access to the internet and the ease of downloading material makes every place of learning a virtual campus. Conventionally we have talked of ‘reading for a degree’ ; we now have the biggest and most openly accessible library the world has ever known and which, furthermore, is available to anyone, world-wide, 24/7, without need of a reader’s ticket.

How do we use that resource whilst preventing total plagiarism?

Today all the exciting possibilities of the virtual campus are open to us and there is no doubt that many more parts of higher education will become independent of the traditional campus, including the most ancient and respected of universities.

We have to ensure that our awards are, nevertheless, ‘real’.

Are there still problems which need further research and development? This paper will suggest that the answer is ‘Yes’

I shall propose that there are four questions which we need to address:

What is a real degree?

Who is the student ?

What form of testing ?

How shall we guarantee quality ?

WHAT IS THIS REALITY ?

For some students it is the study itself which matters and has its own, intrinsic, real value.

But for most students, the commitment of money, time and energy to any course of study is because the award is a significant means of improving their life chances and to command a higher income.

For this to be so the student, employers and other educational institutions, today on an international basis must recognise that the award, even from the virtual campus, is in every way as worthy of respect as any traditional award from Oxford, Cambridge, Yale or Harvard .This is the reality of which I speak

Our marketability depends on user confidence in those things. The users are the student, his family, other academic institutions and employers. All have an interest in the genuineness of our qualifications and all help create our market.

SO WHAT CAN THREATEN THAT REALITY?

Threat number ONE:- is the student who he says he is ; and how do we know?

Security of identity is a recurring problem with all kinds of net access and whilst the true identity of the user is difficult to establish it is even more difficult to protect the genuine user.

How can an award be respected unless we can be confident that the study has been done, the assignments written and the tests taken by the registered student ? If we cannot guarantee that the named graduate has been the person who actually did the work has the award any value?

TWO. Plagiarism is already a significant problem in traditional universities. Yes there are some advances in software which can detect it but whilst that, in the short term, may diminish the problem it does not eliminate it.

THREE. Quality control and assessment are today beset by security problems which question the genuineness of the work by which we assess the student and guarantee qualifications.

Examining has always been something of a paradox. We value open learning but test by a completely closed process.

The lack of control over the internet and the extensive range of electronic devices can easily breach academic security and already threatens the whole examining process.

Even in terms of cost, policing existing practice is in danger of making the examining process uneconomic, yet we cannot allow our qualifications to be devalued.

HOW DO WE TEST AT PRESENT ?

I would like, here, to look at what concerns us when we examine. By our testing we purport to define how ‘learned’ our candidates are.

When we say that someone has ‘learned’ something we may be indicating one of a number of different meanings of learn.

At the most basic level we mean that he has remembered certain facts.

At the next level we acknowledge that he has some understanding of what those facts mean.

For a higher level student we undoubtedly mean that he can apply that understanding in a given situation and to practical tasks.

At the next highest level we surely mean that the student can apply that understanding laterally, to unfamiliar situations.

Finally the truly learned person can build on and develop that understanding into new theses or relate it to other subject areas in some positive and integrated way.

We purport to examine in ways which include all these levels and allow us to differentiate between them. This is, essentially, the basis of our graded awards.

WHAT FORM OF TESTING IN FUTURE ?

This is in my view the most significant but most neglected problem in ensuring ‘reality’.

Conventionally we set final examinations but to an increasing extent today we include forms of coursework, practical work and projects in our assessments.

Employers in particular are entitled to ask not merely what our graduates know but “What can they do?” In many vocationally directed courses this may become a key matter in judging the reality of an award. How, on our e-campus are we to evaluate these things ?

In order to test genuine understanding, lateral applications and extrapolation from factual knowledge we have long believed that some part of the testing must include extended written material. The traditional essay or minor dissertation has an important role in helping us to judge the quality of a student’s thinking.

We strive to protect the integrity of traditional examining . We must continue do this until better is offered.

But what if the traditional examinations become completely discredited and all our users look elsewhere for their guarantee of standards ?

If we do not find a successful solution the words of E.M.Forster might well come true. He wrote, “As long as learning is connected with earning, as long as certain jobs can only be reached through exams, so long must we take the examination system seriously. If another ladder to employment was contrived much so-called education would disappear, and no one would be a penny the stupider.”

We in the world’s wealthier countries need a radical re-think about the whole testing process in the light of unlimited open access to academic resources in the e-world.

By contrast the lack of such access, we should note carefully, also seriously disadvantages students in poorer countries, our future recruits.

As I have already suggested the problems which we face when we look to the future of examining are essentially ones of security. Here we should look carefully at current practice which we may take too much for granted. We have varied the components of the assessment process to include coursework of various kinds and ‘spot’ tests, for example, but at its heart remains the written examination. We have experimented, rather timidly, with ‘open-book’ examinations, where the student is allowed to take the set text into the examination room.

Can we cope with allowing - or even encouraging - wholly open access examinations?

The international paradigm of the examining process is little changed since the Imperial Chinese Court and its recruitment of public servants some 1300 years ago.

Some people have even suggested that that system should be included with China’s other world leaders, the compass, gun-powder, papermaking and printing as its fifth great world-beater!

What we have done for centuries has followed, remarkably closely, the old Chinese Imperial Examinations model. That model included interviews, writing from memory, answering questions, composition writing and ode writing. Apart from the last it is entirely recognisable today!

The current model has been propagated, worldwide, over centuries, by a dissemination process which brought it from China into the monastic learning centres of Europe, which became the ubiquitous model of a university, and thence, via European colonial expansion to its current worldwide use.

We too lock our students away, present them with an unseen paper, supervise them closely and bar all external aids.

The essence of the process is secrecy. Secrecy in the preparation and editing of the papers. Security of the papers so that they remain sight unseen until the invigilator gives the cue to ‘turn over your question paper’ . Candidates are isolated from communication with each other and with the outside world from that moment until the ‘Stop writing’ command.

There follows intense security of unmarked examination scripts; secrecy in the marking processes and in the deliberations of examinations boards until publication of results.

Traditionally the outside world is excluded.

We simply can no longer guarantee this. The technology has penetrated everywhere, even the examination hall. And how many examining bodies systems are immune to hacking ?

SECRECY, RIGOUR,RESPECT

The quality of our award has been guaranteed by the security and rigour of the examining process. Upon that does the whole Quality Assurance process rest. It is what finally decides acceptance of the real value of the award by employers and by other educational institutions , and gives the student true value for his expenditure of time, effort and money.

These are the planks on which the edifice is built and what legitimises the process to ensure

an integrity on which students, parents and employers can rely. Sustaining that security is, I submit, already endangered, if not a wholly lost cause.

We must have solutions to these problems and I suggest that entirely new forms of assessment will be needed . Who is to do the research and development ?

It is a rather remarkable footnote to all this that it is rare for anyone in education actually to be taught how to examine, to write papers and marking schemes or even how to mark the scripts. By some miraculous provision we teachers are assumed to be, by osmosis, well able to replicate all the necessary steps in a system by which, incidentally, we ourselves were declared winners! (By these standards perhaps all policemen should be required to be successful crooks!)

QUALITY ASSURANCE AND MODERATION

We shall all, employers, students, parents, continue to need a ‘performance and potential’ measuring and classifying system which identifies at least the average, the above-average and the exceptional students. Our essential problem is how to maintain the honesty, validity and integrity of such statements.

So far as the accepted paradigm is concerned the PC , the mobile telephone and the Internet have driven a coach and horses through most of the security measures and, added to the traditional ways of cheating the system, have created a position which, I submit, may well already have become indefensible.

We cannot install airport electronic security systems to screen all candidates nor lock each of them into a Faraday cage. (In March 2005 the Times of London reported that mobile phones had been found in the shoes of two candidates at an examination.)

We should assuredly not continue to increase the burden of the cost of trying to preserve the integrity of a system which is probably already beyond defending. Only the most foolish of generals tries to fight an endless rearguard action, inevitably one of attrition.

CONCLUSION

It is clear to me that we need, as a matter of great urgency, a new paradigm. Here, particularly, we need authoritative solutions before we can proceed confidently.

Can we examine in wholly new ways, using open access to the technology to do so ? And If so, how do we propagate a new paradigm?

We need to act now to create that new testing model, which does not depend on unsustainable secrecy but which works within the ‘open systems’ environment and calls on students to show what each can do, in a personally assessable manner, to make use of the opportunities that the technology has to offer.

In the short term we have also to make sure that those societies where the information systems are not as yet so readily available to students are not yet further disadvantaged.

THE CERTIFICATE AND THE OUTSIDE WORLD.

When we think of our students’ improved life chances we must ensure their acceptance, as high quality people, in both the ACADEMIC and the EMPLOYMENT parts of the real world. If we do not do so we shall have failed them, and lost our market.

When they graduate with our qualifications they must bear the imprint of guaranteed quality.

It is the Q.A. which guarantees our reality: it must not lag behind in our eagerness to promote the freedom of e-learning.

The biggest single problem, I suggest, is how to give a new model legitimacy and the impetus to spread it world-wide. This must involve two stages.

Firstly there is an urgent need of fundamental research leading to an international colloquium of all interested parties, including employers, parents and students, where possible models might be discussed and a new code of ‘best practice’ developed.

Perhaps an International School of Examining might be established, staffed by people who are able to think radically about what we are doing and why and with a remit to abandon the traditional and to direct energies towards assessing students for their modern skills and understanding. Could we ever overcome equally traditional institutional self-interest and academic back-biting in order to achieve this?

Secondly, we cannot wait centuries for a similar propagation to that of the Chinese system so the new model would then need the authority of a significant central agency to power it around the world at high speed ! It may be that UNICEF is a potential parent but a truly authoritative academic institution might gain enough power and respect to do the job if it genuinely represented all interests and had significant backing from the users of the product. These may seem like pipe-dreams but without urgent action we face a really rather frightening reality.

We should assuredly not continue to increase the burden of the cost of the security of a system which is already beyond defending.

I present you with the questions - I do not pretend to offer the answers - that is for younger brains than mine. I hope that some will take up the challenge in the interests of us all.

Our Students must face the world and their future with real degrees.

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