Abstract:

Interactive Oral Assessment (IOA) provides an efficient, effective and authentic mode of assessment by enhancing student engagement through a free-flowing two-way conversation. It fosters transversal skill development to increase graduate employability while also providing a robust means to ensure the academic integrity of written assignments in the age of AI. Increasingly, where educators would have in the past assigned a written group report in large class sizes as a means of assessment, this approach in isolation is no longer appropriate as students can use Gen AI in the development of such reports. It can be plausible to examiners that these reports are the students own work, and the use of AI can be difficult to detect, leading to a breach of academic integrity and this approach does contribute to the students’ knowledge and learning. However, these types of assignments do not have to be withdrawn from use as they provide obvious benefits, including experience of group teamwork, building trust and collaboration between team members, practicing project management skills, to mention the few. One of the ways to compliment, rather than stop and police the use of AI, is to combine the traditional report with IOA. This allows examiners to ensure that where students have made use of AI tools that they have fully and deeply absorbed the learnings from this process which can benefit both students and examiners. Students can benefit through participating in an engaging discussion on a topic which allows for the demonstration of a deeper understanding of the key concepts of the module examined in the report as they apply these concepts to new scenarios, interactively introduced during the IOA. Educators can benefit in allowing for assessment of individual contribution and understanding of group activities easily while ensuring that principles of academic integrity are upheld.

However, some challenges exist in adapting this mode of assessment to larger class sizes which often necessitates the use of examiners to conduct assignments in alignment with the demands of the academic calendar. The use of multiple examiners introduces additional complexity in not only managing the logistical processes around conducting interactive oral assessments but also runs the risk of inconsistencies in how the IOAs are marked which would undermine the robustness and fairness of the examination. It is the contention of the authors that while this mode of assessment can provide many benefits to students and examiners alike, to realise these benefits with large class sizes where multiple examiners must be used, careful planning is required, and the use of specific guardrails are needed to ensure consistency across examiners. This paper provides the lessons learned from using IOA across large class groups and examines how this approach can be supported through the use of robust training of teaching assistants combined with the use of robust and easy to follow rubrics, a consistent approach in conducting IOAs supported by the use of technology, the integration of student feedback on the experience of being examined by IOA, and continuity in the use and implementation of IOA across the various years of a computer science programme.

Keywords:

Interactive Oral Assessment, Large Class Sizes, Academic Integrity, GenAI.