Major steps have been taken in the development of EXAM to promote educational cooperation during the early part of the year. In addition to the exam visit, another big reform is the joint exam functionality that has been piloted in the Exam-system during the spring at five universities. A collaborative joint exam means a cross-border exam where the examiners and participants can be from any of the colleges that have introduced the EXAM co-operation feature.
Joint exam pilot began in spring 2019 at medical universities on their medical specialist examinations, that have until now been done on paper. A big step has been taken to digitize the interrogation and to develop common practices to support this through university collaboration. In medical specialist examinations, one interrogation has two evaluating examiners from different universities and participants from all five medical universities (University of Oulu, University of Helsinki, University of Turku, University of Eastern Finland and Tampere University). Another extraordinary feature on these exams is that the assessment is carried out anonymously, which supports the equal assessment of students.
What other cases joint exam might work for?
Based on national medical specialist examination, the first cases to come in mind are the assessment situations and the exams where teachers work in different organizations. This offers added value to the various courses that can be carried out in the form of educational cooperation and enables closer cooperation between universities. Joint exam enables the participation of a visiting lecturer for the performance and evaluation of the course, without solving user rights problems and logging in to the systems of different organizations. All sides of the joint exam work in their own organization’s EXAM system.
Where should the further development of the joint exam be targeted?
It is important to look at the further development of the joint exam at this stage, when the total number of joint exams is about 50 on different medical specialist examinations. Feedback has been collected from students and examiners who have taken part in the pilot, which of course guides the development of the problematic areas. One improvement that was really hoped for is to combine another feature that improves the accessibility of the exams; exam visit, which was introduced in the system during the spring. This will allow the participants of the joint exam to complete the exam at another higher education institution if they wish and so that the participants don’t always have to travel to their own university for the exam. Other aspects raised during pilot include the need for concurrent exams, bring your own device-exams, entrance examinations, and other national examinations.
Read this post in Finnish here.
EXAM 