Exam resit assessments…
Ideally our students would pass everything first time and never need to delay attending an examination, but this is far from reality. After the main UK university periods, typically now at the end of each semester or term, there is also a late summer assessment period. As the name suggests, this summer examination window is an opportunity for students to take exams that circumstances required them to delay, or to have a second go at a failed assessment. For academics sitting the assessments you therefore need to write both the papers in the main examination window, but also those for the late summer assessment. After a few years of doing this, these are some tips to help streamline the process…
#1 Know the ‘form’ of your late summer assessments. I ran a module that required group work and the assessments included a shared final report between students. All fine until individual students required to delay their assessment due to extenuating circumstances. This meant I needed to plan, before the module went live, an individual report option and ensure the module description clearly articulated this. Typically, re-assessments will take the same form as the original but in some cases they don’t have to and indeed can’t!
#2 Exam paper questions need to be the same standard. When you are writing an exam paper that will be sat by hundreds of students it is easy to justify the time to develop excellent questions. You may spend hours crafting a well-balanced paper, a mix of easy and difficult examination elements with innovative questions. However, what we do for the main exam period needs to be replicated for the papers within the late summer assessment period. If no-one sits a paper, you may be able to repurpose the questions for a future year. But ultimately, students taking the exam in the late summer assessment period may be taking the paper as a first attempt due to personal circumstances – so the quality needs to be the same.
#3 All exam papers are subject to the review process. Universities have both internal and external review processes for assessments, ensuring a maintained standard. Re-sit examination papers are not exempt from this. This means you most likely will need to submit both the main and late summer assessment questions at the same time into your university review process.
If you are facing the need to write examination assessments let me know, my Dr CST YouTube video this week is open for comments! Are you dreading it, do you love writing question papers, has it ever gone wrong? Let me know. Have a good week and see you next week.
Caroline, Dr CST