Computer-aided assessment at J-BJI: summary of presentation

We began our talk on 19 June 2024 presenting an overview of the Jinan-Birmingham Joint Institute, a transnational partnership between University of Birmingham, UK (UoB), and Jinan University, China (JNU). At our institute we used the Möbius computer-aided assessment (CAA) system developed by DigitalEd. In the early years of our institute, we used Möbius for all continuous assessments in all of our UoB-delivered modules, contributing 20% towards final module marks, before eventually halving this amount and introducing hand-written assessments into our modules. To develop content in Möbius, we hired student interns as this had previously worked well for other Birmingham-based courses.

As our Möbius assessments contributed to final marks, we implemented a regrading process in which a separate academic staff member would chheck responses to ensure marks were properly awarded and not missed due to e.g. syntax errors. The speaker developed a Möbius code template that attempts to catch these syntax errors and award them 1% of the mark (so that they would be visible in the Gradebook) and a colleague developed a JavaScript bookmarklet to collate student responses to easily modify marks in bulk if needed.

The talk concluded with some considerations from our experience using CAA at scale, to help ensure that any such system under consideration has the features needed to suitably assess students and provide a good user experience for both students and academics.

• Slides from this talk (PDF)