Thoughts on the EDSK Report - Examining Exams (April 2023)

The UK based education think tank EDSK have today published a new report called Examining Exams.

The report is detailed, taking a look both backwards and forwards across the spectrum of assessment in schools, HE and the world of work. Its focus is on the English experience but benefits from international research and comparison.

The learnings in the report offer high levels of validity for our current work here at RM Compare, and also encourage some new lines of enquiry.

The four recommendations

As a product person my immediate thoughts here are to focus in on the problem:

"How might teachers assess coursework (etc) without increasing workload (or by ideally reducing it) while maintaining grade reliability and overcoming bias (especially against dis-advantaged students)?"

Our research tells us that taking a comparative, holistic approach can be part of the solution here. A key challenge we have been focused on has been how to overcome the scaling challenge of Comparative Judgement very well described in a recent AQi publication - Could comparative judgement replace traditional exam marking?. The calculations presented here describe a workload almost quadrupling.

We believe however that an 'On-Demand' approach to Comparative Judgement can be the key to un-locking this. Our testing has shown how workload can not only decrease but can also deliver a number of other compelling benefits.

We will be sharing more on this in the near future.

Assessing the spoken word continues to be a focus for us primarily through our work with the national oracy charity Voice 21. We are excited to be taking part in the Voice21 annual conference next week where we will be sharing more of our learnings. The focus here is again on an 'On-Demand' version of Adaptive Comparative Judgement which we believe can have a transformational effect on this crucial sector.

We love the way that taking a comparative approach can encourage a diversity in response from students and encourages innovative approaches to curriculum and pedagogy.

We continue to build a system that allows users to submit content that works best for them - writing, video, audio in various online and offline formats. We are working with several organisations who are assessing portfolios at scale often with multi-media content.

Look out for some new case studies coming soon.

Increasing curriculum breadth and a promotion of the EPQ (or something similar) is certainly more aligned to the policy direction we are seeing in other territories. Part of this push has been to focus a bit more on competencies as part of the education mix. Having a method of authentic assessment is going to be critical here.

Final thoughts

This is a valuable, balanced and thoughtful report which validates many our own learnings across the UK and around the world in HE, K-12 and the world of work.

There is important work to do here. Please get in touch if you would like to know more.