RMIT University Enhances Assessment Literacy and Quality to Improve Student Outcomes with Cadmus

RMIT University's Assessment Challenge

In 2022, RMIT University launched it’s strategic education plan, ‘Learning through Work and Life’, which focuses on providing high-quality educational experiences that are guided by the institutions signature pedagogical principals (Active, Applied and Authentic) to enhance student outcomes, and the student and staff experience in assessment.

To mobilise this plan, the University partnered with Cadmus, which represented an end-to-end assessment solution to achieve the following objectives:

• Enhance assessment quality and literacy by transitioning away from formal exams and implementing authentic assessments
• Increase learning quality to enhance the student experience and outcomes
• Proactively prevent and detect cases of academic misconduct before point of submission to support student success

Following an initial pilot in 2022, where the following success was achieved (as documented on page 7 of RMIT’s Vanguard publication):

• 100% of all assessments were transitioned to authentic in-semester tasks or open-book assessments,
• 22.5% + increase in the student experience compared to the previous year,
• 1% of students or less presented with potential cases of academic misconduct;

The University implemented Cadmus institution-wide, to support success at scale.

Cadmus Solution

In one streamlined digital environment, Cadmus supported the University to implement authentic assessments that enhanced assessment quality and literacy amongst educators and students, while enabling a proactive approach to academic integrity - before point of submission.

Enhanced Assessment Quality and Literacy: Pre-Built, Authentic Assessment Templates Developed on the Best Practice Principals of Teaching and Learning

Cadmus’ pedagogical assessment environment encompassed all major functionality necessary to mobilise RMIT’s authentic assessment strategy, which focuses on the best practices of teaching and learning to enhance assessment literacy for educators and students.

Within Cadmus, educators across every academic discipline had access to Cadmus’ Authentic Assessment Template Gallery, which boasts an extensive library of pre-built, scaffolded assessment templates and academic skills development tasks that support students to build transferable knowledge and skills, with real-world application.

Further, because students were required to access their assessment rubric, draft, receive feedback and submit through Cadmus, educators had access to real-time assessment progression insights at a whole cohort and individual student level through Cadmus Class Management Analytics. This enabled educators to support students learning journey by understanding if they were accessing required learning resources, progressing timely with the task, and identify students at risk of failure or attrition- before point of submission.

Increased Student Learning Quality and Outcomes: Guided Student Working Environment with Automated Support at Point of Need

Cadmus’ assessment working environment enabled RMIT students to draft assessments with academic guidance and support, receive contextual educator feedback before point of submission, and submit with confidence- through one intuitive environment.

While working through assessment tasks in Cadmus, students were supported with scaffolded assessment checklists, readily available academic resources, educative nudges prompting students to re-write or paraphrase work that appeared inauthentic, and custom time reminders to guide timely assessment progression.

The supportive and scaffolded environment supported an authentic and increased learning experience for RMIT students of varying backgrounds and locations.

Proactively Prevented Academic Misconduct: Real-Time, Academic Integrity Assurance Analytics, which Monitor Construction not End Submission

The Cadmus platform has been built on rich pedagogical principles to support students throughout the learning and assessment process, taking a balanced approach to academic integrity through education, prevention and detection.

To assure the authenticity of student work presented for grading, RMIT educators benefited from Cadmus Academic Integrity Assurance Analytics, which monitors the process around student assessment construction. Analytics show how many hours a student has spent writing their assessment, if work was copied, pasted or transcribed into Cadmus, and if the work appears inauthentic - including through the use of AI-Language Models.

Cadmus Approach

Cadmus delivered the following major phases of work to support RMIT University’s institution-wide approach to improving assessment quality and literacy, and fostering enhanced student learning and outcomes.

Through the assessment services delivered, Cadmus supported workload efficiencies for senior stakeholders and educators and ensured a seamless change management process as captured in institutional outcomes.

Transition of Exams to Authentic Assessments to Support Enhanced Quality and Literacy

Cadmus’ Assessment Design Team transitioned high-stakes exams to in-app summative and formative assessments that scaffolded knowledge development and distributed weighting proportionality across the semester; following the best practice approaches of teaching and learning.

Assessment Re-Design Services for All Academic Disciplines

Cadmus’ Assessment Design Team worked with educators from all academic disciplines to re-design assessments for a digital environment, ensuring assessments aligned with the universities objectives of enhanced assessment literacy and reduced opportunity for academic misconduct.

Customised Setup of University Academic Resources and Skills Development Tasks in Cadmus

The Cadmus student assessment workspace was customised with RMIT University’s assessment support resources and academic skills guides to foster authentic learning and academic integrity through point-of-need guidance.

Training on Harnessing Platform Functionality to Enhance Teaching and Learning Quality

The Cadmus Academic Team delivered comprehensive training to educators in group and individual sessions throughout each semester on harnessing platform functionality to improve assessment, teaching and learning quality.

Training on Harnessing Cadmus’ Academic Integrity Analytics in a Digital and Generative AI Era

With the emergence of AI-Language Models, Cadmus updated the RMIT student workspace with pre-assessment educational guidance on the appropriate and inappropriate use of Generative AI, in addition to declarations of acknowledgement to support academic integrity. Further, Cadmus ran comprehensive training on in-app Academic Integrity Assurance Analytics, which monitor the process of student assessment construction, not the end submission, to identify if an authentic working process has occurred in a digital environment.

RMIT University’s Outcomes

Harnessing Cadmus’ platform functionality to enhance assessment quality and literacy amongst educators and students, RMIT University achieved the following results institution-wide between 2023 - 2024.

Educator Outcomes:

Increased Authentic Assessments

98% of the courses using Cadmus at RMIT University utilised Cadmus’ pre-built authentic assessment templates available in-app and transitioned away from exams to support an increased student experience, low academic misconduct rate, and high submission and pass rate.

Student Outcomes:

Increased Assessment Experience and Outcomes

Across 9,328 student users, an increase in grade average scores, pass rates and the student experience was achieved for students working inside of Cadmus compared to those working in an external platform such as Microsoft Word. Further, the student experience score increased by 13.57% when supported by Cadmus, compared to the reported 74.3% student score in 2022, as captured in the SES National Report.

• 87.87% of students rated their assessment experience with Cadmus as good to excellent
• 92.0% of students strongly agreed that it was easy to understand how to complete their assessment in Cadmus
• 83.89% student assessment submission rate when using Cadmus
• 93.03% of students received a passing grade

Decreased Cases of Academic Misconduct

Implementing best practice, authentic assessment tasks with a scaffolded working environment enabled RMIT students to understand their assessment requirements, engage timely and proactively with the task at hand and reduced opportunity for academic malpractice.

Cadmus Academic Integrity Reports evidenced that students had high authentic engagement with assessment, and on average; students completed their assessment over 5 unique working sessions, accessed the in-app academic resources 2 times, and received 4 educative prompts guiding them to paraphrase or re-write work that appeared inauthentic before the point of submission

• 19.89% was the average Turnitin similarity score for students, with Turnitin’s benchmark of below 20% indicating authentic work
• 5.90% of students presented with a Turnitin similarity score higher than 50%, showing a limited number of academic misconduct cases.
• 357 Cadmus Academic Integrity Reports were accessed by RMIT University educators to identify students at risk of misconduct before the point of submission, which enabled early intervention and the ability to guide students back on track.

University Outcomes

Workload and Cost Savings

Cadmus’ end-to-end assessment capabilities underpinned workload and time savings associated with assessment administration, educator and administrator workloads, and student progress and success in assessment for RMIT University.

The findings represented in this model use available University data and publicly available higher education benchmarks to demonstrate how the platform drives efficiencies at scale.

Assessment Task	Time without Cadmus	Time with Cadmus	Cost without Cadmus	Cost with Cadmus	Improvement in Cost and Time
High Quality Assessment Set-Up Setting up assessment end-to-end	1,013 hrs	165 hrs	$73k	$12k	84%
Monitoring Student Progress Monitoring and supporting student progression in assessments	750 hrs	113 hrs	$54k	$8k	85%
Supporting Student Queries Providing instruction updates, and responding to queries at point-of-need during assessment	675 hrs	25 hrs	$49k	$16k	67%
Marking and Moderating Submissions Managing deadlines, exemptions and submission issues, and marking submissions	4,875 hrs	3,345 hrs	$353k	$243k	31%
Investigating Academic Integrity Detecting potential academic integrity breaches, and investing these instances	2,175 hrs	495 hrs	174k	41k	77%