Online Assessment and COVID: Opportunities and Challenges

As higher education moved abruptly online in response to COVID-19, it necessarily swept assessment along with it. Assessment has long been the subject of debate, particularly in the context of ensuring that the people being awarded the grades are those who actually did the work. While some universities have moved away from rigidly authenticated assessment, trusting the students to behave with integrity, others see value in ensuring that they assess the right people. This paper reports on interviews with a dozen leading computing educators in Australia, and finds that the move online brought by the pandemic has highlighted both of these positions. Some academics do indeed trust their students to behave with complete integrity and see no need to supervise or authenticate the students’ submitted work. Others strive to ensure integrity as long as all assessment remains online and unsupervised, and are desperate to return to invigilated formal examinations. We endeavour to find common ground in these positions, and discuss the likelihood of a sustainable future for assessment in computing education.