Macquarie University Professor Proposes End to Exams

A senior professor's suggestion that exams could be abolished as a method of university assessment is prompting considerable controversy.

Professor John Simons, Executive Dean of Arts at Australia's Macquarie University, made the proposal in order to open up debate around the issue of how students are assessed.

Many of the professor’s colleagues have come out strongly against the notion, which was discussed at a meeting of Macquarie’s University Academic Senate.

The Faculty of Business and Economics, which attracts a high proportion of the university’s fee-paying international students, has come out particularly strongly against the suggestion.

Ongoing review

The professor’s paper was part of an ongoing review of how students are assessed at the university. The proposal is framed as three arguments in favor of examinations as a method of assessment, which he then proceeds to counter by revealing the inherent flaws he perceives in each one.

The three arguments in favor of exams are:

• They counter grade inflation (which occurs as a result of liberal assessment regimes making it easier to perform well)
• They mirror cases in reality in which decisions must be made without recourse to advice;
• They guarantee that the work produced is a student’s own.

The counter arguments, as summarized by the Vice-Chancellor, Professor Steven Schwartz, were as follows:

• To deliberately seek to depress marks is not a positive approach and will not necessarily prevent grade inflation
• The situations which an exam might prepare you for do not occur on a regular enough basis to justify the idea that working blind is appropriate preparation for professional life, and it is possible to develop such test skills without recourse to formal assessment;
• Any perceived rise in plagiarism may be exaggerated to justify a particular method of assessment, and if it is really on the rise it might be best to reconsider how new technologies challenge traditional ideas of ownership rather than clinging to exams.

Despite the paper’s status as fulcrum for debate, Professor Simons has informed us that he is genuinely behind the proposals, and that he believes assessment in general is an issue that needs to be addressed in higher education.

“I am convinced that the same student will achieve different results on the same material depending on what assessment method is being used. This is in much the same way as the different ways different universities have of understanding the significance of the totality of a student’s assessment outcomes will impact on the overall outcome for a student.

"As a very experienced external examiner in the UK system, for example, I have seen many examples where a student would have got very different results in a different university with the same run of marks. So there are two important questions: one concerns individual assessment regimes; the other how regulatory frameworks impact on assessed academic outcomes.”

He tempers his proposals, however, by suggesting that where unseen exams can be shown to be relevant to the learning outcomes of a unit of study, they might be justified.

Need for change?

Simons is not alone in his views. His counterpart at the University of Adelaide’s Faculty of Science, Professor Bob Hill, who last October denounced examinations as ‘archaic’, praised the Professor’s suggestion.

“I applaud the vision shown by John Simons. Universities have a great deal of work to do on assessment and we must move to a system that best allows us to judge the level of understanding students have developed during their training, in an environment that does not impose unnecessary pressure.

"The written examination system is not the best solution to this problem and the sooner we move away from it, the sooner we will be able to demonstrate to students that our main concern is the quality of their education and their wellbeing as individuals. In my view the best assessment process for the future will be a tiered approach - if we can decide what level must be reached for a student to achieve a pass in a course, they can work on that at their own pace.

"Beyond this, for those students with the ability and ambition, we could set further levels of assessment that allow higher grades to be achieved. This will require a significant change not only in assessment, but also in teaching methodology, but we have certainly reached the stage where our obligation is to allow each student to learn in their own way and to the best of their ability.

"The first universities that achieve this kind of step change will have a significant and well deserved advantage."

Status of students

Less positive feedback came from Dr Craig Freedman, a former faculty member at Macquarie, who was quoted by The Australian as criticizing the proposals as treating students as customers to be kept happy rather than educated.

To this, Professor Simons retorted, “I wouldn’t draw such a hard line between enjoyment and education. The second comment is that it is not true that I see students as customers. In fact, a policy paper I put to my own faculty last year specifically requested that we should not use the word customer to describe our students.

"Students have a complex and often very rich relationship with their university and the word customer not only fails to capture it but it also diminishes it. Clearly there is a commercial relationship between students and the university and they do, in a crude sense, buy a service and/or a product.

"However, they are also full members of the collegiate body and, as such, deserve that their experience be as fulfilling and useful as it can be. In particular, we have a duty to ensure that they get the best value – in every sense – from their experience at university.

"In the context of academic achievement I think that this means that we should try to assess them in ways that help them to get the best outcome they can achieve and I don’t believe that unseen examinations are likely to do that. I suspect that in the context of the world of work students who have been taught to learn through self-initiated enquiry and collaboration are more likely to be useful employees than students who have learned how to do memory tests under pressure.”

Professor Schwartz commented, “I think there will always be at least some role for traditional examinations, but, in a vibrant university culture all aspects of what we do ought to be up for debate and discussion, including the question of exams.

"It is not a bad idea to engage in these debates as a means of looking more closely at what we do, why we do it, and whether or not we are doing it well enough. Subsequent decisions, if any, can be made through the appropriate university channels where rigorous discussions are encouraged.”