By embedding Cadmus, Larissa streamlined integrity processes, gained real-time visibility over marking across a large teaching team, and ensured accessibility needs were supported without disrupting delivery — enabling a structured, transparent, and scalable approach to Nursing assessment that strengthened both student outcomes and staff oversight.

For Larissa Cameron, Lecturer in the School of Nursing, Midwifery and Paramedicine, delivering assessment in Mental Health Nursing requires both rigour and scale.

Assessment plays a critical role in ensuring students not only meet professional standards, but develop the analytical and clinical reasoning skills required for safe nursing practice.

But scale introduced three key challenges:

1. Maintaining defensible academic integrity processes
2. Coordinating marking across a large and distributed teaching team
3. Ensuring accessibility needs were supported without disrupting delivery

Assessment in Nursing is not simply about grading performance — it is about preparing students for safe clinical practice. That meant building a system that upheld standards, supported staff oversight, and maintained equity for students.

Designing assessment for large-cohort Nursing education

Learning outcomes in Mental Health Nursing emphasise application, evidence-based reasoning, and professional accountability.

Students are expected to:

• Apply clinical reasoning to case-based scenarios
• Interpret and communicate evidence clearly
• Demonstrate safe and ethical professional judgement

With 2,200 enrolled students and 14 assessment items — including weekly iRAT/tRAT quizzes and three major lab reports — Larissa needed an approach that would solve those three challenges without compromising academic standards.

Solving for integrity at scale

Rather than relying on fragmented LMS workflows, Larissa embedded Cadmus to centralise visibility across the assessment lifecycle.

Cadmus enabled educators to:

• Access comprehensive evidence trails for academic integrity escalation
• Review submission history and working process transparently
• Strengthen confidence in escalation decisions

This ensured integrity investigations were supported by clear documentation — reducing uncertainty and administrative burden.

Solving for large-cohort marking visibility

Coordinating marking across thousands of submissions can quickly become manual and inefficient.

Through Cadmus’ dashboard, Larissa was able to:

• Monitor marking progress in real time
• See which markers had completed grading and how many submissions remained
• Identify bottlenecks before feedback release

For a cohort of 2,200 students, this visibility strengthened oversight while reducing coordination overhead.

Solving for accessibility and student support

Accessibility also emerged as a key consideration.

When queries arose regarding students with dyslexia, the Cadmus team worked collaboratively to implement a compatible Chrome extension to better support those students.

Rather than accessibility being an afterthought, it became integrated into the assessment process — ensuring inclusive participation without redesigning the entire workflow.

Assessment spotlight: Increasing student confidence through formative design

Beyond operational oversight, Larissa intentionally used formative assessment to build student confidence early in the semester.

Weekly iRAT/tRAT quizzes familiarised students with the Cadmus platform before higher-stakes lab reports were introduced.

This approach:

• Reduced potential pushback associated with introducing a new platform during summative assessment
• Increased psychological safety and student confidence
• Encouraged early engagement with expectations

Skill Builder Templates were also used to target common areas of concern and known student weak spots.

Rather than assessment being purely evaluative, it became developmental — scaffolding students before higher-stakes tasks.

Outcomes for students

Larissa’s structured approach to solving integrity, marking, and accessibility challenges supported strong outcomes across the cohort:

• 95.7% submission rate
• 80.8% overall pass rate
• +7.2% higher pass rate for students working within Cadmus

In a program preparing students for professional clinical practice, these outcomes reflect more than completion — they demonstrate engagement, academic uplift, and scalable quality assurance.

By embedding Cadmus into assessment design and delivery, the course strengthened confidence at every level: Students became familiar with the platform before high-stakes assessment, markers gained clear visibility over progress, and integrity processes were defensible and transparent.

In a cohort of 2,200 students, assessment needs to be both scalable and supportive, and for Larissa, it became both.