Centrally managed exams to be held online using new AssessmentUCL platform

10 February 2021

How the main examination period will operate on UCL’s new digital assessment platform.

students studying in the Students' Centre

The Temporary Operating Model for the main examination period (April/May 2021) will see all centrally managed exams take place online as open book assessments on our new AssessmentUCL platform.

Following rigorous testing of assessments by multiple departments and faculties, we are pleased to share that we will be taking forward a partnership with our preferred supplier, Uniwise, to deliver their WISEflow product as our AssessmentUCL platform.

This new platform will allow us to meet staff requests to have shorter, timed exams and to offer a wider set of online marking tools than those available in Moodle. It also responds to long-standing requests from students and staff to have more student-friendly comprehensive, intuitive, and purpose-built digital assessment platform.

Operation of 2021 exams

The operation of 2021 exams will be similar to last year:

Staff will submit their exam papers to the central Exam Operations team who manage the timetabling and uploading of papers.
Students’ examination timetables and AssessmentUCL will indicate whether an exam is a 24 hour open book or a timed exam.
For students requiring an examination adjustment on a timed exam, their duration will be 24 hours for all exams.
The Exam Instance will be visible before the examination period but the exam paper will NOT be accessible before the start time indicated in the timetable.
Students will take the exams online in AssessmentUCL rather than Moodle.
A link to an examination paper query form will be made available for students to complete if they have a query on the exam or need to report a technical failure. The information will then be passed to teaching departments/faculties.
Students will download the PDF exam paper and work locally, they will need to convert their document into a PDF to then upload onto AssessmentUCL.
Scripts will be collected from AssessmentUCL rather than Moodle for marking and moderation, although there will be an additional option for this to be completed within the platform.
AssessmentUCL is integrated with UCL’s Turnitin licence and similarity scores and reports will be available for viewing by examiners.

Students will be sent communication on how to access the platform and how to engage in the practice environment before the exam period.

See Exams 2021 for key dates and full details of the operating model for April/May 2021 exams.

Assessment UCL platform

In future, AssessmentUCL will be an end-to-end digital assessment platform that will support formative and summative digital assessments – both central and departmentally managed.

Our aim is to provide a platform that supports the broadest possible range of assessment methods. This includes formative and summative examinations, presentations, dissertations, MCQs and coursework using a variety of media and languages used at UCL.

However, we have listened to staff and students who have said that in this disruptive year, you do not have the capacity to learn a whole new system for assessments. We will therefore be using limited platform functionality for the 2021 exams. At the same time, a smaller number of academic staff will pilot the platform’s end-to-end functionality by fully designing and delivering their 2021 assessments in the system, including MCQs, videos, presentations etc.

In the next academic year, we aim to see this further functionality rolled out to the whole teaching community and integration of the platform with Portico.

We acknowledge at the outset that this platform will not immediately meet all the needs of all disciplines, assessment methods and marking practices. Over the coming year, we will be gathering further requirements of particular assessment methods and disciplinary needs and continue to develop the platform to meet those requirements. In some cases, this may take time and we will want to ensure minimum disruption.

See AssessmentUCL project for more detail on the project phases and the platform rollout.

Town Halls and training

Staff are invited to attend one of three Town Halls where we will provide a brief update on the AssessmentUCL platform and a Q&A on the 2021 exam process – from submission of exams through to marking and moderation.