State of the art e-assessment is not e-marking. The essence of assessment is immediate feedback to students. Effective e-assessment informs teachers and helps them to personalise the assistance and tuition they provide to their students. 

In March I attended the e-Assessment Question 2008 exhibition and conference in London. The second day’s keynote forum was introduced with a report on assessment and e-marking, which set the agenda for the forum.

I struggle to see how you can mention assessment and e-marking in the same sentence, never mind the same breath. e-marking is about setting students scripts, collecting the scripts, scanning them, distributing them electronically to invigilators who – for consistency – mark specific items, collating scores for students and then many weeks later informing students of their scores.

But my issue with e-marking is more fundamental than this. It is as if when television was launched it was announced as a great way to show still pictures. We have an old and flawed way of assessing students, and introducing e-marking does not fix the process. Worse, it gives the illusion of progress and encourages the retention of something that can and should be replaced. We have the television but we still want to use the magic lantern, and wow we can make the lantern brighter.

We all know that high-stakes exams are expensive stress tests. We also know that low-stakes formative assessment not only measures performance but also improves it. Let me reiterate – formative e-assessment provides students with immediate feedback that improves their performance.

We are in the age of the internet and we have e-assessment systems that will support the teacher in the classroom with informative assessment. This provides students with individual feedback on their strengths and weaknesses, immediately – not weeks later when they have forgotten the questions. These systems have automated marking, not e-marking. They are fully adaptive, adjust to each student and are not pre-set tests. They are centrally hosted, implicitly moderated, and have item performance management. They can even be used from home.

These e-assessment solutions are low-stakes systems that build a longitudinal profile of each student’s performance over time. The profile informs pupils, teachers and parents and engages students in improving their own performance – the ipsative effect. They are tested when ready. Students can have off-days without them becoming disruptive, or catastrophic, for their futures. 

Even better, state of the art e-assessment systems produce educationally reliable results that render stressful and expensive high-stakes exams redundant.

Not all e-assessment systems are equal. Delivering educationally reliable results through e-assessment does mean avoiding MCQs – multiple choice questions. Many systems are populated with MCQs because they are quick, easy and cheap to churn out. But students can guess the answer to MCQs without necessarily knowing the correct answer. The quality of an MCQ depends on the number and quality of distracters – alternative answers – included. Providing four alternatives in an MCQ means each has a 25% chance of being right. Poor alternatives mean a weak question that is more easily guessed. Does real life present us with options like MCQs? I don’t think so. I have yet to go into to a shop to buy four oranges at 10p each and hear the shop assistant say the cost is a)14p b)40p c)41p d)£4.10 – have you? Again MCQs are a flawed process for which efforts to improve – by adding more distracters and quality – is the wrong way to go. The right way is properly structured questions that really test the students’ understanding – not their ability to make intelligent guesses.

So for me, the e-Assessment questions are:

* why are we polishing flawed processes?
* Why do we think that e-marking in the high-stakes exams process is a better process?
* Why do we tolerate MCQs?
* Why are we wasting time and money on inferior ways of doing things?

To labour the television analogy: we have the television but we are not using it to show moving pictures – in colour with synchronised sound. There is a better way than high-stakes exams and MCQs.

State of the art e-assessment that delivers educationally reliable results is alive and well and being deployed in all schools in Northern Ireland, in authorities in Scotland and schools in England – it could be in a school near you!

Dr Barry Hagan is director of Alta systems, a provider of automated Adaptive Learning and Teaching Assessment systems for schools.