Case Study
The University of Melbourne Runs In-Place, Digital Exams at Scale in Exam Halls
The University of Melbourne (UoM) implemented in-place digital exams at scale using co-designed Cadmus pedagogical software that supports student success and the highest level of academic integrity.
About the university
Share with colleagues
Download the full Case Study
Take an in-depth look at how educators have used Cadmus to better deliver assessments.
Highlights
82.47%
Positive Student Experience
0
Cases of Academic Misconduct
99.99%
Cadmus Platform Uptime
Overview
The University of Melbourne (UoM) implemented in-place digital exams at scale using co-designed Cadmus pedagogical software that supports student success and the highest level of academic integrity.
In the first semester of 2024, the University held just over 39,000 digital exams that were:
- invigilated with students’ own devices using Cadmus exam functionality overlaid with lock-down browser functionality.
- implemented and run by the University’s central team
- held in the 3,000-seat Royal Exhibition Building with breakout spaces for students with alternative exam arrangements.
The digital in-place exams saved UoM money, lowered stress for students and reduced academics’ workload. Overall, 82.4% of students rated the experience as a positive one, and the Cadmus platform maintained a 99.99% uptime.
Find out how the University of Melbourne and Cadmus achieved it in this case study and in a webinar recording setting out the University’s approach.
The University of Melbourne’s in-place exams challenge
The University of Melbourne faced a challenge common to many universities post-pandemic: maintaining the benefits of digital delivery of exams while preserving academic integrity in an online environment. They also needed to be able conduct the exams at scale.
Academic integrity concerns have increased with the emergence of generative AI but academics recognised that a return to on-site, paper-based exams (involving greater expenses, more work for academics and fewer benefits for students) would have been a significant step backwards for the University in terms of student learning and outcomes.
The University needed to find an exam delivery solution that overcame the limitations and drawbacks of digitally proctored or invigilated exams. The exam method needed to not impinge on the student experience or student privacy, while maintaining the highest level of academic integrity and supporting both educator and student success in high-stakes exams.
“We'd been fully paper, we went fully digital and now the idea was, ideally, to come back to digital on campus. We didn't want to introduce new technologies, but leverage what we had been using for assessment design across the semester. We also wanted to move to the broader strategic agenda of broadening learning design towards assessment FOR learning rather than OF learning.”
Cadmus’s in-place exams solution co-designed with The University of Melbourne
They had previously experimented with Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) assessments but faced concerns around security, while also being keen to maintain the benefits of the Cadmus platform students and staff were already familiar with. Thus, the University of Melbourne and Cadmus co-designed a digital in-place exams solution.
The new exams solution drew on Cadmus’s baseline product of a pedagogical and scaffolded learning environment that supports students through the process of their assessment. They then incorporated an additional layer of locked browser functionality and Cadmus’s Academic Integrity Assurance Analytics. This monitors the process around student assessment construction, rather than the end submission to ensures an authentic working process has occurred. The analytics flag any unusual behaviour in the exam hall for educators while students are in the sitting.
With Cadmus’s lock-down browser exams, educators can seamlessly set up, deploy, monitor, mark and moderate high volumes of exam submissions with ease and efficiency. The solution supports multiple exams formats and is accompanied by rich configuration settings:
- Varied exam formats: Short- and long-answer questions, essay response exams, multiple-choice questions and customisable individual exam-specific settings.
- Customisable exam settings and configurations: Configure exam-specific settings such as auto submissions, late submissions, and feedback, while also allocating optional reading time to help students understand expectations before they begin.
- Student progression and reliability features: Ability to add extra time for individual students or alternative exam sittings, as well as auto-saving functions throughout the exam.
- Streamlined marking and moderating: Ability to allocate student marking automatically, while seamlessly tracking marking progress across multiple markers in one dashboard.
- Assurance of academic integrity: Locked browser functionality is paired with real-time Academic Integrity Assurance Analytics, which monitor the process around student assessment construction behaviour and provide clear indicators highlighting the authenticity of each individual’s work during the exam sitting.
“We worked closely with the Cadmus team and they were very responsive. It was good to know we had a resource where, when something is requested or questioned, we have the certainty it will be responded to and actioned.”
How the University of Melbourne implemented digital in-place exams
Following an successful proof-of-concept pilot where both educators and students reported overwhelmingly positive outcomes, the University moved to scale the solution. The result: more than 38,000 digitally implemented exams delivered across three major faculties: Medicine, Dentistry and Health Services; Business and Economics; and Law.
To deploy in-place exam sittings at scale, the University took the following steps:
Step one: Preparing staff and students
The introduction of on-campus digital exams was a major change project for the University, and Cadmus partnered with them to support and prepare stakeholders, educators and students with roadshows, training and drop-in sessions. With Cadmus, UoM had access to direct staff support for assessment design as well as exam preparation.
“We promote the digital exam experience through videos for students—both generic and for each venue—hosted on the student support website to prepare them for what is to be expected in an online digital exam setting.”
Step two: Venue set up and preparation
The primary exam venue seated 3,000, with two or three sessions running a day for three weeks. In 2024, 1,500 of these seats were digitally enabled for semester one, rising to 2,500 in semester two. A further 370 seats were digitally enabled in an alternative venue, plus 2,500 dedicated places were set up to support students with approved adjustment plans. These plans provided options such as extra time, a soundproofed pod or access to a scribe.
Fibre was cabled into the historic building and Wi-Fi access points were hung from the rafters to prepare the exam halls for the new digital exams. In addition, every desk was fitted with a power strip and a digital exam checklist.
Step three: In-exam logistics
Students used their own laptops in the 100% digital exams. The exam hall was also equipped with a fleet of laptops for immediate, direct swap outs for any student who encountered a device problem.
The Cadmus platform auto-saved students’ work every three seconds, so in the event of a device swap, a student could log back in within 30 seconds and pick up where they left off, able to see everything they had written up to that point.
Some exams required educators to provide additional resources for students, such as court case studies or formula sheets. The University provided these as hard copies on the desk so students could refer to them while answering the question digitally, avoiding the need to jump between different browser tabs on their laptops while taking the exam.
“Prior to using Cadmus, we had issues with students losing their work in exam sittings, which promoted a stressful and intense reaction in an already stressful environment. We needed a solution to overcome this. Now using Cadmus, academics and supporting professional staff have confidence and reassurance in the process because of the platform’s auto-saving and reliability features.”
Step four: Preparation by the exams implementation team
The Exam and Graduation teams ran all in-place exams, with a core team of 12 staff who coordinated the event, timetabling, and controlled the exams in the venues. This team was supplemented during the exam week by 200 staff who controlled and invigilated each row in the hall. The Digital Assessment Support Team of five to six permanent staff dealt with exams and also broader assessment across the semester, supplemented by eight postgraduate students checking quality assurance on the papers for six to seven weeks. The IT team ran the network and had about 25 people in venue to help students with any login issues and deal with device swap-outs. Even with this level of staffing, the central personnel costs were more than offset by the reduction in marking costs in the faculties.
How Cadmus supported university implementation
Cadmus’s Academic Team supported the University to set up, implement and deploy 38,000 digital in-place exam sittings through:
- Co-development of a digital in-place exams solution: Cadmus captured and incorporated ongoing academic and student user feedback into product development to ensure a high-quality, pedagogical and secure exam solution was developed.
- Assessment design services to support effective high-stakes exams: exams were redesigned in alignment with best practice to support student higher-order thinking and demonstration of learnt knowledge, rather than knowledge recall.
- Academic and exams stakeholder platform training: Cadmus delivered group training and 1:1 consultations to support understanding of harnessing platform functionality to enhance teaching and learning quality in an online environment.
- On-site exams venue set-up: Cadmus worked in partnership with the Learning Environments, IT and Infrastructure teama to set up a fleet of desktop computers in the exam venues.
- On-day exam delivery support: Cadmus collaborated with the University to create an exam plan detailing strategies for preparation, delivery, management and student communication. In addition, Cadmus worked with IT and Infrastructure to secure the exam hall’s network, blocking external access.
- Academic integrity assurance training: Cadmus provided all stakeholders comprehensive training on harnessing Academic Integrity Assurance Analytics in combination with locked browser functionality, to detect unusual assessment construction behaviours during live exams sittings.
Exam outcomes
Cadmus’s digital in-place exams solution supported the University to achieve financial and workload benefits—in addition to enhanced assessment results—among 6,702 student users and 261 educator users.
- Student experience: 82.47%
- Exams submission rate: 87.29%
- Student success rate: 73.85%
- Cases of academic misconduct: 0%
- Cadmus platform uptime: 99.99%
Benefits for the University:
- Cost savings from platform and workflow efficiencies: Previously, the University faced large costs associated with paper-based exams attributed to printing and scanning, and academic marking and moderating workloads. With end-to-end assessment delivery available through the Cadmus platform, the University is now benefiting from streamlined efficiencies.
With digital exams, as soon as the exam is finished it can go directly to the marker—or be marked automatically the moment the exam is finished if it is multiple choice. The largest exam delivered at the University—which all first-year Psychology students take and amounted to 78,000 pages in total—is now auto-marked before the exam session has even concluded, leading to significant cost and efficiency savings.
“Although implementing Cadmus initially involves higher costs, we've gained a clear understanding of its financial advantages. The scale of our Cadmus rollout has significantly reduced expenses per faculty, particularly in exam marking. Our academics can now grade papers remotely, and we've dramatically reduced on-campus written exams by digitising the entire marking process through an efficient digital pipeline."
- Improved assessment design: Cadmus’s digital marking functionality allows flexibility with marker’s scoring guidelines if necessary. If markers notice students are answering questions differently than expected under the scoring criteria, the seamless digital workflow enables the subject coordinator to easily adjust the markers' guidelines.
“It’s a massive improvement on workflows, quality assurance and baselines. Once it is all digital, you can do all the analysis of question balance, whether questions are discriminatory or not in terms of student outcomes and student success, and gain insights into the student performance and the performance of the assessment itself.”
Benefits for educators:
- Reduced workloads attributed to assessment setup and marking: Using Cadmus, educators reported significantly reduced workloads relating to setting up, deploying, marking and moderating exams due to the platform’s end-to-end, streamlined exam workflow capabilities.
“All of a sudden, faculties moved from having dozens of tutors marking to only a handful, or the subject coordinators marking everything themselves. We were able to use TurnItIn for similarity checks and do other academic integrity checks through Cadmus. This was all now available to us because, with digital workflows, the marking was all distributed digitally.”
Benefits for students:
- Reduced anxiety and improved exam experience: Students reported an improved assessment experience when able to complete high-stakes exams digitally, as opposed to writing by hand for long periods of time. In addition, the supportive and scaffolded environment within the Cadmus platform guided students’ timely progress in assessment, resulting in higher overall submission and pass rates.
“After having used Cadmus for my assessments throughout the semester, it was great to be using a familiar platform when it came to exams. The ability to type and digitally submit my answers instead of handwritten papers made it a much better experience, somewhat less stressful!”
Learn more:
For further information, view Cadmus and The University of Melbourne’s webinar recording on transitioning to in-place digital exams at scale, here.
Category
Exam Alternatives
