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We Need to Talk: Interactive Oral Assessments in Business Education
Designing assessments that assure learning in the age of AI is a challenge. How can we assess learning and be sure that students have achieved the learning outcomes we say they have? Interactive Oral assessments (IOs) gained attention during the COVID-19 lockdowns as an alternative to on-campus exams (Logan et al., 2020) and is now…
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Excel – a new way to join the dots
Professional judgement is hard! How do students learn to make complex professional judgements? The complex professional judgements required of accountants and other business professionals contain many sub-decision points. Critical thinking is a central component of accounting and business higher education curriculum (Coupe et al., 2023; Bryant, 2023). In the 3rd-year unit, ACCT3011 Reporting on Business…
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Developing Learning Skills through Multi-Part Assessment
British academic and author Phil Race in his excellent and straightforward guide for teaching in higher education called Making Learning Happen, declared that assessment is the most powerful lever we have to influence student behaviour. Former University of Sydney Pro-Vice Chancellor, Paul Ramsden (2003), noted that assessment is the actual curriculum. It determines what is…
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Individualised authentic assessments: Stress-tested in critical times
With the sudden closure of face-to-face teaching with COVID-19 in early 2020 … there was mayhem as universities around the world suddenly and unexpectedly went fully online. Sangster et al (2020) documented this well for accounting subjects. Educators and students alike felt stressed, isolated, unsupported and mourned the loss of their sense of community. Planned…
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Exploring Innovations and Inclusion in Assessment Practices
The Assessment in Higher Education conference leads the development of assessment for learning in higher education and ran for two days last week in Manchester UK. With around 300 delegates from across the globe this is one of the biggest dedicated international conferences for assessment and feedback. I presented our project on designing quality online…
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Bringing calm to the chaos: Using educational theory to reframe AI in higher education
The furore around Artificial Intelligence (AI) and its significance for education and academic integrity can be overwhelming. Opinions abound on the merits and provocations of using (or not) these tools (see for example Bryant, 2023). UNESCO have recently produced this comprehensive report to getting started with ChatGPT and AI and outlines other major challenges including…
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Nurturing graduate employability with prosocial engagement
Graduate employability – the ability to find, create, and sustain meaningful work across the lifespan of a career and in multiple contexts (Bennett, 2020) – is a top priority for the University of Sydney. Our graduates have been ranked the most employable in Australia and fourth globally (QS, 2022). Although our industry engagement is world…
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Framework for evaluating online assessment in business education: Trade-offs in promoting innovation
In the context of the rapid transition to fully online teaching and learning driven by COVID-19 (Ali, 2020), the Australian Business Deans Council commissioned a research project into online assessment in higher education in Australia. The cross-institutional project team consisted of members from the University of Sydney Business School, UTS Business and Chartered Accountants ANZ.…
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Transforming Assessment Across Disciplines
Current assessment and progression policies and practices in higher education are primarily dominated by the dichotomy between formative and summative assessments. This blog is based on an ASCILITE 2020 conference paper (Cerimagic and Khanna, 2020), in which my co-author and I discuss using programmatic assessment in a transformative way. We critically reflect on how medical…
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Building Authentic Assessment
Why is authentic assessment important and what perceptions do students have of it? The notion of authentic assessment was first introduced in the 1980’s in an effort to shift away from standardised testing. Remember the multiple choice tests where you would colour in a red circle (A, B, C, or D) with a 2B pencil?…
