Has the assessment sector lost the digital exam story?

The story of digital exams and assessment is at risk of being hijacked. How so? Journalists conflating online exams with remote proctoring. Regulators saying 'written essays are the purest assessment'. Government advisors and policy folk absently forgetting digital exam trials and deployments over the last 20 years.

Digital assessment and exams are at risk of becoming politically toxic. Not because digital is bad, but because they’re often badly explained by the sector, with weak and obscure advocacy. What’s missing? Digital exam stories that compete with paper exam stories, and feel human.

What should be a debate about assessment quality and true accessibility, mutates into one about control, surveillance, dumbing down, and restriction. All negative. Once tarred with that brush, accusations can stick, and when a narrative is established, facts struggle to dislodge it. Political kryptonite.

When the digital exam story becomes one of control, surveillance, dumbing down, and restriction, baseless accusations from paper evangelists can stick.

Paper enthusiasts and calligraphers dominate the assessment story

Mainstream and social media continues to erode sector trust with headlines such as “digital divide” and “AI is breaking assessment”. Isn’t it time we had balanced coverage? Digital needs to be the “fixer” of assessment ills, giving comfort and assurance, enabling stakeholders to tell their truth on digital exams.

Digital needs to be portrayed as the ‘fixer’ of paper assessment ills.

Too many business leaders and marketers take the path of least resistance, the easy option. A conference selfie. A product webinar led by whizzy features seen by tens of viewers. White papers lightly circulated, never seen by decision makers. Non-revenue bearing ‘evangelists’ with nothing insightful to say. Futile. The sector could lose the public information battle on digital exams before it realises it's in one. You can’t short-cut the art of persuasion.

Too many activities slow the cause. We need to win people over, not do what’s easiest.

Too many suppliers shy away from true, sustained engagement, preferring to stay in the safe, collegiate warm bath of familiar conferences and anodyne LinkedIn posts - lest they ‘offend’ a customer, prospect, or shareholder. Poorly designed websites hiding boiler plate case study PDFs. Designed-by-committee uber-niche conference presentations, so removed from the mainstream they could be legitimately described as underground. Playing to the gallery, not over-coming objections.

Digital exam advocacy is currently hidden in poorly optimised websites, unseen webinars, and uber-niche conferences. How much time and money is wasted on effort that nobody sees?

Why should the sector care? The consequences of not having a true voice and differentiating are multiple. Me-too products that lead to commoditisation (an investment red flag), price-driven procurement, service enshittification, technical debt, and recruitment issues.

The sector must acknowledge public fears rather than dismissing them and translate sector benefits into everyday wins. How about university place offers based on real grades, not ‘halo and horns’ biased guesstimates? Or making better and quicker learning interventions?

Paper exam stories are emotional, human, and easy to grasp. They’re told through nostalgia and 'tradition', with a sprinkling of platitudes, that people can relate to. Media and policy folk simply can’t relate to digital exams: only their paper exam lived experience at school and university.

Many people simply can’t relate to digital exams and assessment – it’s not their lived experience.

How do we take control of the digital exam story? Create some tension to give people a reason to care. They see paper exams as the safe, reliable good guys. Digital is the threat. ‘Big Tech’. ‘Too much screen time’. ‘Won’t somebody think of disadvantaged students’. ‘Celebs hate it’. 

Flip the narrative. Show and tell the paper-based problems that blight learners and educators. Show digital shining a light on every area, building trust across stakeholders. Make decades of compound evidence on digital exams and e-assessment more accessible in different ways, tailored to reach the different stakeholders.

And have faith that digital will be on the right side of history. Ignore those who choose to cling to the past with confirmation bias, locking learners out of equity they deserve.