Archaic examination culture of UK universities must be reformed

Although practical work is essential in many subjects, including my own (Engineering), it is also necessary that students are able to compete in an ever more ruthless world of work. Keeping examinations to test what they can do (as opposed to what a group can do) should thus still form part of the assessment process.

Teaching ethics for computer science, I have found that a 24-hour 'takeaway' open book examination produces a higher quality of assessment - including better discrimination between the best and the rest. I don't want to go back to a memory-test 2-hour paper.

Utilising multiple assessment strategies helps avoid just the short term learning that examinations maintain. However, it isn't just down to Universities, in my programme we have to abide by decisions made by professional bodies.

While I can see the importance of practice based assessment for practice based disciplines, many disciplines are not practice based. How do you do a practice-based assessment of a philosopher? Often this is the role take on by dissertations in such subjects - course work that is more similar to professional activities in those subjects. But these can be very time consuming, both for students and for staff marking them. Our (biology) students do a 12 week practical dissertation/research project, and probably takes me 5 hours to mark each one all told. That doesn't scale to having all assessment done that way for hundreds of students. Even coursework essays still take at least twice as long as their exam-written counterparts and coursework essays have the same problems for setting regurgitation questions as exams do.

I wonder what planet Craig Mahoney has been living on. Does he really think universities have not been assessing students' practical skills - where relevant to their courses - for decades? For example, laboratory work and (for higher years) project work always has been a large part component of assessments in physics, and similarly in other STEM disciplines. But examinations are also necessary to test the breadth of subject knowledge and understanding of concepts (Mahoney's hypothetical engineering student might be able to use a mass spectrometer, but do they understand how it works?). It is a fallacy that examinations predominantly test memory and recall - if the exams Mahoney set (if he ever did set exams) were like this, perhaps they were not very well designed.

Here is an alternative take. Universities waste too much time on this.Give a completion certificate to those that meet minium acceptable standards (practical skills or theoretical knowledge). Employers can worry about the recuriting the most suitable candidate from those that apply for jobs by devising their own tests. Most do that anyway. Funnily enough..universities themselves so this. PhDs are not graded like an exam. So when univeristies want to hire a fresh PhD, they conduct interviews/ask the canidates to do a mock lecture/grill them on their research paper etc. In other words they conduct various tests to satisfy themselves that they have got most suitable candidate. So even without the sorting provided by grades in an exam, universities are able to pick out those that are suitable for them. Why wont this work in other situations?

This article is second rate. Exams have existed for a very good reason to separate the wheat from the chaff. When well designed they are an excellent test of students abilities. There are a variety of means of assessment used in Universities these days which is great but abolishing exams is a plain stupid idea.

Separating wheat from the chaff is a binary decision. The ever more complex mechanisms of examining students goes beyond that. It is finer grading of the wheat that is what the examination system is trying to achieve.