Reading up on assessment

Quick summaries of three articles on assessment that have been sitting in tabs in my browser for too long. There are more, but it’s Saturday!

Pentland et al. (2026) write about “Asynchronous oral assessments: enhancing integrity, engagement, and communication in the AI era“. They use two cases where the asynchronous oral assessments (AOAs) are used in combination with in-person multiple choice (MC) tests, and find that students prepare for AOAs with more active learning strategies and also think they are more relevant and engaging than MC tests. They conclude that “AOAs represent an administratively scalable and pedagogically meaningful complement to traditional assessments“.

Ok, but what do they actually do in AOAs? First, they motivate oral assessments in general. Oral assessments can be more interactive, provide opportunity for better communication between assessor and assessee because questions can be asked and rephrased both ways, can be formative. Students, as mentioned above, also study differently for oral assessments because they know that learning things by heart will only get them so far and because oral assessments feel more meaningful. Pentland et al. (2026) also argue that “oral assessments can enhance fairness and inclusivity” (which, yes, they can, but they definitely don’t always do!). But they are not so easily scalable, and efforts to make them scalable involve for example limiting questions per students to only 1 or 2, giving random questions from a pool, and limiting time to answer to 1.5 to 2 minutes. While they write that students and TAs “viewed the experience positively“, to me this sounds absolutely terrible, both as a student and as a TA! They discuss that this is done in recruiting a lot, too, where people have a short time to see a question and then 2-3 minutes of recording begins automatically, to efficiently interview people early on in the hiring process.

But yeah, that is basically what they do in their study, except integrated in a LMS (and using GenAI as a second opinion on scoring…). This format sounds insanely stressful to me, especially the 30 second countdown timer from when the question appears until when the recording starts! Which is also what “some” students report: 59% say that the AOAs are more stressful than in-person exams (which are stressful, too, let’s not forget that) and 59% also say that nervousness made them perform worse. More than 50% nevertheless said they could demonstrate their understanding better in the AOA than in the in-person exam (which was half applied stuff, half MC test, so maybe that’s why?).

I understand that from an “assurance of learning” and efficiency perspective, AOAs like this might seem tempting, but I find the idea terrible to put people on the spot like that (and that is one of the advantages the authors list, that it “emphasizes the learner’s own voice and on-the-spot thinking.”) and if the goal, as the authors imply, is to “keep[…] human expression at the center of assessment“, maybe we should actually, you know, make sure to take the time to talk from human to human?

Next, Droulers et al. (2026) on “Interactive oral assessment: co-existence of formative and summative purposes” (or, as my favourite colleague commented when I said that “interactive oral assessment” sounded interesting,”oh, novel concept, people talking to each other!”. Gotta love the snark!). The authors write that “One of the notable cases of relying on oral assessments is in Germany’s education system“, especially in Diplom programmes (and I studied in one back in the day), so maybe that is why I have so many emotions and opinions on oral assessments? Anyway. Let’s start with a definition: “An Interactive Oral Assessment (IOA) is a genuine, free-flowing, and unscripted conversation between an assessor and a student (or a group of students/assessors) around an authentic workplace-aligned scenario […], to more comprehensively evaluate each student’s understanding“. This is actually what I have often experienced — many of the oral assessments I had to do as a student started either from a topic I chose myself, or even a question that I picked, and then moved from there. I thought that is how most oral assessments work? Apparently not!

But, on to this study. So they want to have formative and summative assessment co-existing, so surveyed students across many different study programmes on their experiences with IOA. Overall, students were positive about IOA as “robust, authentic, and valuable for their professional development” (also mostly my experience as student, a lot of opportunities opened up for me after having done an IOA with someone who then had a job for me, wrote letters of recommendation, etc), and the interactive nature helped them stay on track by reacting to signals from the assessor, and, importantly, assessors can help manage student stress levels. But of course, even though they are more satisfying and have all kinds of benefits in terms of enhanced academic integrity etc., they are of course more work for assessors. And even though in my perception IOAs are the oldest assessment format in the book because I grew up with them, for people to whom this format is novel, this is definitely a useful article that makes a good case to give IOAs a try!

Next, Winstone & Gravett (2026) on “Assessment Arrythmia: restoring rhythms of time, space, and practice in higher education“. This article is motivated by the student experience of being constantly assessed on lots of small modules, with uneven distribution of workload, without having the time to learn from one assessment and apply that to the next assessment situation; and with feedback given too late to be useful. Education is organised linearly, with modules of defined lengths and fixed examination periods, rather than oriented by how much time is actually needed for different processes. The authors identify three main problems:

• assessment frequency is getting faster and faster, effectively preventing deep engagement, care, reflection, recovery; “it privileges immediacy over maturation and throughput over understanding“, which is of course terrible for both students and teachers
• there is temporal dissonance within modularised curricula, leading to a focus on the next task only, rather than on long-term development and cummulative learning
• temporal surveillance by prescribing how long a task can take and when it can be done (see rules for exam turnaround times), how much time can be invested in relationships between teachers and students

But, there is hope! Or at least some suggestion by Winstone & Gravett (2026) for what to do:

• “Slowing the pulse of assessment“, for example by replacing many discrete tasks with fewer tasks that go through formative processes of drafting, feedback, revision; using portfolios that students build over time; using submission windows rather than deadlines (I never get that last recommendation though — isn’t the end of that window the same as a normal deadline? Nobody prevents anyone from finishing their assessment early and sitting on it until it is due? When I see that applications for something are open until a certain date, in my mind that date is the deadline, and I work with that one no matter how much earlier I could theoretically have submitted something, even if whatever I want to submit is in fact finished earlier. What if I come up with a good idea before the deadline but had submitted it already? So can someone explain what the point is with those windows?)
• “Synchronising beyond module silos“, for example through shared assessment calendars so that workload can be distributed and learning integrated across modules in programme-wide assessments (e.g. through portfolios)
• “Restoring relationality to temporal logics“, for example protecting time for relationships (feedback conversations, careful marking, etc), and longitudinal advising relationships for continuity and care, and acknowleding that there is a lot of emotional work involved in teaching and giving room for professional judgement: “professional judgement in assessment involves deciding when to intervene, when to wait, when to accelerate, and when to hold the line“

Glad I read this affirming article today, makes me feel a lot more hopeful after reading the first one!

Droulers, M., Krautloher, A., & Shaeri, S. (2026). Interactive oral assessment: co-existence of formative and summative purposes. Teaching in Higher Education, 31(1), 67-85.

Pentland, S. J., Lowenthal, P. R., & Krier, K. (2026). Asynchronous oral assessments: enhancing integrity, engagement, and communication in the AI era. Educational technology research and development, 1-24.

Winstone, N. E., & Gravett, K. (2026). Assessment Arrythmia: restoring rhythms of time, space, and practice in higher education. Higher Education, 1-18.

Walking to today’s dip…

Luckily the sun came back!

Love water!

It makes me so happy to see these colors and structures!

And I really need to do something about my camera’s lens some time soon!

Walking back home (after sitting at my favourite spot for a bit!)