Exams

It is July, and my second exam period here at UCL is officially over. However, things could not have looked different when compared to last year. Traditional exams, which here at UCL usually have the form of multiple choice and short essay questions taken in a huge exam hall, have been substituted with so-called alternative assessments due to social distancing measures places as a result of the COVID19 pandemic which has been scouring the world for the past months. In this post, I would like to go over these alternatives and explain why I think that in many aspects, they might be better than their traditional counterparts.

At my faculty – the Faculty of Life Sciences,  the decision has been made that to reduce any potential problems with the limitations of the school's internet infrastructure (caused by thousands of students connecting at one time to complete their exams), all alternative assessments will take the form of so‑called coursework assignments – essays variable in length and count based on specific modules. For the last few months, I have thus written ten essays totalling at about 10,000 words on various topics varying from molecular signalling during the development of the vertebrate spine to mechanisms of computer analysis of protein sequences. Needless to say, it has been a couple of exhausting months of repeated reading of scientific literature, summarising of our present findings, and writing it up in a (hopefully) coherent and well-argued piece. And even though, in my opinion, they have been more demanding when compared to traditional exams, I believe that they bring several key advantages that make them superior to both students and the university itself.

Traditional exams in the form of multiple-choice questions are designed to assess students on the module syllabus in a very short time in a way that is very easy (and cheap!) to interpret and all students need to do is to memorise the content only to forget it a few hours/days later (let's face it – we all have been there). For reasons that still elude me, module organisers occasionally decide to sprinkle a short essay question (or two) on top – from my experience, these essays are very hard to write, as one has only a few minutes from first reading the question to plan and write a well-argued answer. While, as I have said, these exams are straightforward and cheap to interpret, I believe that they are not the ideal way of examining students and that better options that reflect the day-to-day life of scientists (whom we are studying to be) exist – as evidenced by the last exam period.

Drawing on my personal experience, I believe that the so-called coursework assessment reflects the real-life work of a scientist much better when compared to a traditional exam. To succeed, students once presented with a question (same as being assigned to a new project) have to read the up to date available literature and analyse the problem at hand – discover potential shortcomings in our present knowledge, wrap their head around any potential controversies. Subsequently, they have to formulate a comprehensive and concise answer to the question at hand. All this in a matter of a few days. This creates a lot of opportunities for students to develop essential real-life skills such as research (finding appropriate literature), scientific reading, interpretation, pondering, time management, or writing (it is horrendous how many poorly‑written publications there is out there). All of these skills are used by real scientists daily. Although the marking of essays is more costly, I believe that the investment is indeed worth it, as it provides students with much experience and allows for honing of the essential skills outlined.

In short – I wish exams like this were to stay.

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