AssessmentUCL project

Delivering an end-to-end digital assessment delivery platform to support the UCL assessment journey.

The AssessmentUCL Project is an initiative of the UCL Student Experience Transformer. The project is part of 'Challenge 4. The assessment & exams journey', under the 'Being assessed' workstream.  

Project vision and benefits

The Digital Assessment project was established in 2020 to procure and deliver an end-to-end digital assessment delivery platform to support online assessments. The project is a collaborative effort: bringing together Academic Services, Arena, and Information Services as well as academic and administrative colleagues in faculties.  

In October 2020, we selected AssessmentUCL as our digital assessment platform and following accelerated testing and integration, we delivered over 1000 assessments for more than 48,000 candidates during the academic year 20/21. We plan to deliver more than 1900 assessments for over 65,000 candidates in the academic year 21/22. 

The platform offers many benefits, including:  

• providing an enhanced student experience;  
• offering diverse assessment opportunities;  
• enabling automatic upload of student marks to Portico. 

We recognise that there is still a long way to go to deliver a seamless online assessment journey for staff and students. We are working actively to understand AssessmentUCL user experiences and to identify platform enhancements that could improve this experience. We collaborate closely with our platform supplier, to make them aware of feedback, prioritise enhancements and help them to develop a roadmap for continuous improvement.  

UCL assessment journey

It includes practical pedagogic and administrative steps to highlight where policy, process and/or technology influence, disrupt or hinder the assessment journey and where significant variations in policy and practice exist. 

Mapping the assessment process in this way highlights the co-dependencies at different stages of the journey that can make a difference to student and staff experience. 

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2020-21 AssessmentUCL evaluation report

To understand what has gone well during the Temporary Operating Model and any areas for improvement, the Digital Assessment Team, supported by a small team of student ChangeMakers, completed staff and student surveys and a series of interviews and focus groups.  

The findings from the staff and student staff surveys reveal a set of positive and negative experiences.  Staff found the platform was generally robust and delivered a largely consistent experience but comments focused on improvements they would like to see to platform settings or functionality. 

The 2021-22 evaluation report helped shape this year’s Assessment Operating Model, the work of the new digital assessment advisory team and departmental communications with faculty and students. 

Some examples of enhancement requests that are being progressed by our platform supplier as a result of our feedback and requests include:  

1. It will now be possible to set up multiple choice questions to provide automated feedback to students so that they can see which questions they got right or see the correct answer if they answered incorrectly. This will deliver a richer student assessment experience.  
2. Improvements will be made to marking tools to simplify navigation and provide a more intuitive marker journey including the ability to customise the way that feedback is shared with students and other assessors and reducing the need to manually select this for each piece of feedback provided. 
3. Availability of Turnitin (text similarity checker) to be made available on additional assessment types (currently only available on one assessment type), helping to ensure academic integrity. 

There is no one assessment platform that delivers all the requirements of a multi-disciplinary institution such as UCL, so the team are also investigating potential procurement of additional assessment platforms to meet the full range of our needs. 

Download 2020-21 AssessmentUCL evaluation report [Word]

Download AssessmentUCL evaluation report: summary slides [PPT]

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How your Digital Assesment Advisor can help

In recognition of the scale of change for faculties, we have appointed a team of Digital Assessment Advisors (DAA) who can support them with onboarding to AssessmentUCL. DAAs will work with departments to understand their assessment requirement, determine the most appropriate assessment type and advise on how to correctly set up assessments to get the most from AssessmentUCL platform. 

If you would like to find out more, please contact the Digital Assessment Advisor for your faculty or email the  ISD.Digital Assessment Advisory inbox with your query. 

Your named faculty contacts are listed below. 

Digital Assessment Project working group

To inform our planning we have established an academic steering group drawn from our community of Exam Board Chairs, and a ‘Digital Assessment Delivery Working Group’ comprising professional services and academic staff from across UCL’s Faculties. These groups will help to review our plans and to continuously shape our future requirements for the platform.

Membership 

• Academic representatives from each faculty
• Administrative representatives from each faculty
• Faculty learning technology leads
• Student union representatives
• Members of the project team

The full list of members is available in the Frequently Asked Questions section. 

The purpose of the group is to:

• Input into the design of processes and policies;
• Support change activities to ensure faculty staff are ready for go-live;
• Cascade communications provided by the project team to faculties;
• Provide faculty feedback to the project team;
• Advise on and support engagement activities across faculties such as workshops, demos, lunch & learns and townhalls;
• Advise on training plans and activities;
• Support go-live activities;
• Become a super-user (potentially a subset of the group) and provide additional support and guidance to faculties. 

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Town halls and FAQs

Brief update on the AssessmentUCL project, including next steps, February 2021

• Q&A on the 2021 exam process from submission of exams through to marking and moderation.
• Panel: Derfel Owen, Joanne Moles, Steve Rowett.
• Recording [UCL login required]

Assessment Operating Model, 2021-22, October 2021 

• About: An update and Q&A on the revised academic regulations for this year's assessment operating model. 
• Panel: Joanne Moles (Head of Assessment Delivery & Platforms, Academic Services), Lizzie Vinton (Academic Regulations Manager, Academic Services), Prof Simon Walker (Academic Lead, Arena Centre) and Anisa Patel (Head of Digital Assessment, Digital Education).
• Recording [UCL login required]

Introduction to the Digital Assessment Delivery Project, November 2021

• Recording from Friday 13 November 2021 (SLMS) [UCL login required]
• Recording from Monday 16 November 2021 (SLASH & IOE) [UCL login required]
• Recording from Tuesday 17 November 2021 (BEAMS) [UCL login required]

Frequently asked questions (FAQs)

What is the governance structure for the project?

Digital Assessment Project Board

Accountable for the delivery of the project. Provide direction for the project and resolve issues and blockers.

Project Team

Carry out the day to day project task activities to deliver the project.

Digital Assessment Delivery working group

Feed into the future processes and implementation plans; support two-way communication between faculties and the project team; advise on training activities and plans; support go-live activities.

Who is on the Digital Assessment Delivery project group?

Name	School	Faculty
Prof Aeli Roberts	BEAMS	Bartlett
Jenny Post	BEAMS	Bartlett
Samantha Ahern	BEAMS	Bartlett
Dean Barratt	BEAMS	Engineering
Anna Trostnikova	BEAMS	Engineering
Marrietta Bamidi	BEAMS	Engineering
Dr Richard Osborne	BEAMS	MAPS
Jadranka Butorac	BEAMS	MAPS
Sukh Thiara	BEAMS	MAPS
Dr Russell Evans	BEAMS	MAPS
Dr Simon Harden	BEAMS	MAPS
Tim Neumann	IOE	IOE & Laws
Noreen Kassem	IOE	IOE
Jo Pearce	IOE	IOE
Prof Norbert Pachler	IOE	IOE
Dr Christine Hoffman	IOE	IOE CLIEE
Adam Salisbury	IOE	IOE CLIEE
Tony McNeill	SLASH	Arts and humanities
Abbi Shaw	SLASH	SELCS
Abbi Shaw	SLASH	Arts and Humanities
Michael Veale	SLASH	LAWS
Farah Rouba	SLASH	LAWS
Beth Beasant	SLASH	LAWS
Dr Silvia Dal Bianco	SLASH	SHS
Matteo Fumagalli	SLASH	SHS
Kitty Ho	SLASH	Arts and humanities
Fiona Harvey	SLASH	SHS
Jelena Calic	SLASH	SSEES
Tomas Cvrcek	SLASH	SELCS
Michael Wozniak	SLASH	SSEES
Tomas Cvrcek	SLASH	SSEES
Dr Steven Bloch	SLMS	Faculty of Brain Sciences
Dr John Greenwood	SLMS	Faculty of Brain Sciences
Hannah Spikesley	SLMS	Faculty of Brain Sciences
Neil Roberts	SLMS	Faculty of Brain Sciences
Jay Varia	SLMS	Faculty of Brain Sciences
Donna Pile-Grant	SLMS	Faculty of Brain Sciences
Dr Alison Sturrock	SLMS	Faculty of Medical Sciences
Prof Nathan Davies	SLMS	Faculty of Medical Sciences
Tony Kiangebeni	SLMS	Faculty of Medical Sciences
Taylor Bennie	SLMS	Faculty of Medical Sciences
Hazel Smith	SLMS	Life Sciences
Kirsty Martin	SLMS	Life Sciences
Janice Kiugu	SLMS	Life Sciences
Jane Simmonds	SLMS	Population Health Sciences
Sean Gainford	SLMS	Population Health Sciences
Students' Union
Simon To	Leadership Development & Change Manager
Ayman Benmati	Education Officer
Jim Onyememnam	Postgraduate Students Officer
Yasmeen Daoud	Welfare and International Officer
Project Team
Derfel Owen (Chair)	OVPESA
Joanne Moles	Academic Services
Katherine Majid	Academic Services
Simon Walker	Arena
Steve Rowett	Digital Education
Tanya Tomic	ISD
Sabina Lamstaes	ISD
Shaun Kent	ISD
Karen Ofosu-Orchard	ISD
Alexis Nelson	ISD

How is engagement with students taking place? 

The Students' Union UCL (SU) are part of the Digital Assessment Working Group and will feed into all relevant areas of the project.

With support from SU, the project will also be holding student focus groups to capture wider input from the student body.

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