Abstract:

This position paper reports on introducing standalone digital exam systems (eExam) in Swedish K-12 education. In 2017 the Swedish government announced that all national exams carried out as part of compulsory education will be digitalised by the year 2022. But already from mid. 2018 some parts of the exams were to be conducted on a digital device that enables certain functionalities such as locked screens and anonymisation. In order to comply with these demands, most schools have been forced to acquire and implement systems for eExam. The Swedish government has also recently decided that The National Agency for Education are to strive for a digital solution that enables central automated grading. For this purpose, The National Agency for Education has begun developing a national solution that will include all national exams.

In this paper, two different perspectives of the situation are described and discussed — first, aspects of the acquisition and implementation process of systems for eExams in the Swedish educational system. Second, possible consequences of shifting from a decentralised manually grading process to a central, automated alternative.

The conclusion is that eExam is understood by the procuring organisation and the developers as tools with limited relations and relevance to broader teaching and learning practices. And that a transformation of high stakes assessment, such as the national exams, will have inevitable effects on several dimensions of the educational practice. And since the national tests are central to the success of students and schools, given the Swedish school market, it should be expected that central ways of designing, conducting and grading tests over time would diffuse and take over local practices.

Keywords:

E-Exam, BYOD, digitalisation, technological implementation, national exams, high-stake assessment.