Teaching Talk #5: Assessments, Student Collaboration, and Integrity

This winter's shift to an alternative delivery method created tensions between maintaining academic integrity and recognizing equity and mental health challenges. In this talk, we focus on a Math project delivered to 600 CEPS second year students and an Engineering exam delivered to 250 Engineering first year students. Both instructors chose to re-design their assessments to focus on integrity rather than on enabling the easy prosecution of rule-breakers.The Math project acted as a replacement for weekly, in-lab coding assignments; instead, students formed groups to research numerical methods that were new to them and wrote a short report. The Engineering exam shifted from an invigilated, individual assessment with no aids, to a non-invigilated, open-book, collaborative exam; this shift necessitated an associated re-think of the exam questions themselves and of methods to encourage inclusive, small group collaboration while discouraging widespread answer-sharing. In this talk, we share some of our experiences, reflections, and feedback regarding these assessment redesigns.