Written by: Kiran Gupta (LLB III)
Excerpts of this interview were originally published in Honi Soit. This transcript has been lightly edited by the interviewer for clarity and brevity.
The interview was transcribed by Katie Richards (JD 1).
Kiran: What are the pedagogical benefits and disadvantages of take-home exams, both in terms of the short-release take-home exam and the long-release take-home exam?
Nicole Graham: In the eyes of some of my colleagues, short-release exams reduce the possibility of cheating. But in the eyes of different colleagues, cheating happens all the time anyway, and there's nothing you can do to stop it, so it doesn't matter if it's two hours or two months. Students who are going to cheat will cheat. So, they don't see that the short release take-home exam has any difference to the long release assignment.
I think that all of this is brought about by a pandemic where we can't have sit down invigilated exams. Before the pandemic, we would have long or short release assignments, or we would have invigilated exams. From my point of view, an assignment is not equivalent to a supervised assessment.
The benefit of a normal two to three-hour exam that’s supervised is that you reduce the amount of cheating. Those benefits are lost when it's unsupervised. I don't really see the benefits of a two-to-three-hour exam, I think if it's unsupervised – why does it need to be two or three hours?
Really long take-home exams (24-48 hours) take some time and pressure off students compared to a normal two to three-hour exam but the disadvantage is that some students believe mistakenly that if you give them 24 hours to do an exam, it takes 24 hours to do it. I worry about the pressures that students put on themselves to basically work for 18-24 hours. I think that's a very high amount of stress to put on people when they're in a pandemic.
So I'm not sure that the benefits of the 24-48 hour exam outweigh the risks. The risks are even bigger with a 48 hour exam; students working on one thing for two days really intensively.
That’s why the University introduced what they call ‘Expected Student Effort’ in relation to this so that we could prevent students working too intensively. And hopefully most students understand that a 24-hour exam is approximately about four hours of writing and editing and maybe another two to four hours of research or thinking or preparing and whatever. So, it shouldn't really be more than a normal workday. I hope that our message reaches students.
I am concerned that there might also be questions of equity, because some students have the control over their own time so they can control a whole 24-hour period. But some of our other students have children or parents or siblings/a partner for whom they are a carer. And they could never spend 18 hours on a task so that’s another concern that I have.
Kiran: Can I then take it from your response that, if in a hypothetical world where there was no pandemic that supervised face to face exams, in your opinion, are more beneficial than take home exams for the most part?
Nicole Graham: Well. I don't know about that. I think that if we remove cheating from the perspective, I think being asked to provide all of your knowledge of a subject in two or three hours is a pretty big ask, whether that's take home or supervised. The expectation is that students are going to come up with 60 or 70 or 80 or 90 or 100 percent of the knowledge of a whole subject in two or three hours. I think that's a very big ask.
Kiran: Is there anything you'd like to add to your discussion of the advantages and disadvantages of either take home or face to face exams?
Nicole Graham: The Law School provides programs that are accredited by the Legal Profession Admission Board, the LPAB, and obviously whilst the University is entirely responsible for its own curriculum and assessment, the LPAB does require graduates to have studied certain topics. But now that the pandemic has arrived, it's also an open question now about whether the legal profession also requires face to face learning and supervised assessment.
So, for example, there are a number of international students at Sydney Law School. And those students may not plan to use their law degree from Sydney Law School in Australia. They might plan to use it overseas. And there are a large number of bar associations and accrediting bodies all around the world that will not recognise a law degree where there’s been a certain percentage of unsupervised assessment or online learning.
So that means that if we have an 100% unsupervised assessment regime, then international students would not come to Sydney Law School because then they can’t practice in their home jurisdiction.
So there is interest from the New South Wales accrediting bodies and the New South Wales Bar Association in this question of supervised assessment. It seems from an accreditation point of view, that they prefer supervised assessment as a form of quality assurance.
Kiran: Would you say there's any advantages to the take home exam in terms of perhaps more breadth of knowledge?
Nicole Graham: I think if you're a fan of exams, you're going to love exams because you think that the learning outcomes that you're getting out of the exam is sufficient. It's like a race. If that's what you're looking for (e.g. if you're a coordinator and your learning outcome is applied knowledge) then you might think an exam is perfect. Whether that's take-home or supervised, doesn't matter. You're giving such a tiny amount of time to apply that there's no way you could succeed if you weren't 100 percent on top of the knowledge. But if you aren’t then you’ll prefer the take-home.
Kiran: What is the Law School’s plan for next year would be if the borders don't reopen?
Nicole Graham: If the borders don't reopen, there would not be much prospect of ‘return to campus’ exams. However, we are under some pressure for our international students in particular to provide supervised assessment. So, if we're going to continue with take-home exams in 2022, then that will need to be balanced by new forms of supervised assessment.
At the moment, we are researching different kinds of ways that we can supervise what our students are doing and mark them. That might be debates or moots or presentations or class participation and things where we can see that the student with that name is doing those skills.
But we don't know. Like all of our colleagues in Australia and around the world, we’re just trying to be really agile, ready to move and ready to pivot at any moment in the same way as this semester where we were supposed to return to campus and now, we're all online.
The other thing to bear in mind is that the Law School cannot determine the style of exam. The decision about that is actually taken by the University Executive, not by faculties and schools. So even if the School said, ‘Oh, we want to stay with take-home exams forever’ – If the University decided to return to on-campus exams, then we would need to think about whether we want to continue with exams and have on campus exams? Or would we have different kinds of alternative, long-release tasks that might test collaborative/oral skills and things like that?
Kiran: In your experience and maybe from discussion with colleagues, do you think that the preparation, marking and writing of take-home exams has been more onerous for staff?
Nicole Graham: When the pandemic started, no one knew how long it was going to last. I think by that stage the exams had already been written and they were going to be sit down exams and then all that changed was that we asked students to submit them online. But as things progressed, we had a really big surge in cheating and a massive surge in special consideration applications and things like that.
As a result, I think coordinators have started to spend more time writing questions more carefully because they thought, ‘well, if there's lots of cheating, then I need to write a question that allows me to see who are the honest students that really understand it and let them perform well’. Therefore, if you needed to cheat, you would be disadvantaged.
I think it's about the same time to write two or three hour exams (whether sit-down or take-home) as you're assessing the same learning outcomes. The learning outcomes of subjects haven't changed through the pandemic.
But I think the marking is different. Online marking is far more time intensive. From the University's point of view, it's less risky and less complicated. But from the marker’s point of view, it compels you to sit at a computer for hours, because the nature of marking is time sensitive. So if you receive 250 exam scripts and you've got nine days to mark them, you're not having a day off and you're probably going to be doing it between 12-16 hours a day.
Now, if you can move around the house with pen and paper and mark those exams, that means that you’ve got some flexibility, in terms of your body and your physiology. But when it's in front of a screen, you do get a lot of repetitive injury. And so I guess that's hard. A lot of us are marking at home and lounges are not set up for work. So, I think that there are some risks to staff with online marking, especially with a high volume in a short period of time. So, it's not necessarily as though they're taking more time to write the exams, but they certainly are taking more time and absorbing more physical risk when marking online exams.
Everything also goes through Turnitin. We separately see the Turnitin report. So, if you have 300 students, you now have 600 papers to look at – 300 submissions and 300 Turnitin reports. It's doubling what you're looking at.
Kiran: You said there was a massive rise in cheating – how does the Law School detect contract cheating and are those processes effective?
Nicole Graham: The University is now spending more time and energy than ever before on new and improved ways to detect all kinds of misconduct. So not just contract cheating, but also collusion and plagiarism. That’s time and money that could be spent on learning. So that's really unfortunate. I think that's one of the downsides of the online assessment world; that resources that can be spent on teaching are now being spent on stopping cheating or picking up cheating. Our sector is under siege so it's not like there's lots of cash to throw around. But markers are getting more experienced now. At the start, some markers had experience with Turnitin and now all markers have lots of experience with Turnitin.
We're having more staff training around how to find, detect and report academic misconduct. The reporting systems are changing. We are, of course, challenged resource-wise. We used to have maybe two or three people in the School who would look over any allegations of cheating on a paper and now our team has more than doubled in size. And that team is made up of academics who already have a normal job to do, and they don't get extra pay to do that. So, it is an unfortunate additional workload. The whole online assessment world brought that to us.
But having said that, there are colleagues who think that online marking is really great because they can do it anywhere. Before, we tended not to take marking home as it was a risk to the exam scripts. So there's pluses and minuses with everything.
I guess the other factor is that we also need to allow for transition time and adaptation time. So, at the moment, things are new and are different. And so we can expect people to not really know and understand how to use these new processes. We’re seeing students writing in upload time because they don't get that it’s like the old days where we had pens down and you stop writing. So students are learning and adapting to go, ‘I have to stop writing now because it's upload time’. And so all those students who used to go, ‘Oh my god, I didn't get to hand in my assignment because I didn't get to upload my exam as the exam site has closed,’ that's decreasing now. So students are learning.
Similarly, markers are learning how to use SpeedGrader. I remember the first time I used SpeedGrader, it took me three times longer to mark one paper than it did before. So I worked 32 consecutive days without a day off, whereas I would normally maybe do that in 21 days. So it was really, really hard and that made it really stressful. But academics are learning. I'm better at using SpeedGrader now than I was.
I'm a teacher and I fundamentally believe that humans are great at learning and we're great at adapting. Students are improving their online exam behaviour and academics are improving their online marking. Also, University systems in relation to special consideration and replacement exams are improving as well. In a lockdown and a pandemic, it's hard and it'd be great if we didn't have to do it. But there’s silver linings, we are learning a lot. And we'll see where it goes.
Kiran: Is there anything else you'd like to add?
Nicole Graham: I just want to thank you for raising it, it's a really important issue and I know lots of students worry about and think about this a lot.
I just want to say to students that most academics have a really close understanding of student experience and we feel for students learning in a pandemic.
It's very suboptimal and we try really hard to give students our best and we wish them the best. We do appreciate how hard it is, and we wish it was different, but we'll do the best that we can to support them and good luck to them.