Instructor: Dr Jean Lagacé
Email: jean.lagace@kcl.ac.uk
Module: Operations on Infinite Dimensional Vector Spaces (MSci and MSc Mathematics)
Assessment activity: for 20% of the module assessment, students complete a mid-term exam in two parts: the first is sat individually and in the second part students retake the exam (with some added question types) in small groups. Both parts are graded, with the individual part assigned a heavier weighting, and an algorithm applied to combine both grades.
Why did you introduce this form of assessment?
The two-stage exam retains a key traditional summative assessment that most tutors and students are familiar with. It also provides a formative element which allows students to explore the exam material in a deeper way through co-construction of knowledge. It is most commonly associated with Professor Carl Weiman from the University of British Columbia in Physics.
I first heard about this from a colleague at UBC and was reminded of it as an alternative assessment when starting King’s by doing the Learning and Teaching Programme! I have now been doing this for the last 3 years.
I was really interested in being able to give instant feedback in a way that was more organic. I was also interested in the group work element. There is little opportunity on most Maths programmes to work in a group except on the more applied programmes, but Maths graduates will inevitably still need some collaborative skills for their future careers. A few other modules on the programme may have group work but this is the main opportunity they have to do this for assessment on the Maths programmes.
For more information on the theory of two-stage exams please see https://blogs.kcl.ac.uk/aflkings/rich-in-informal-feedback/two-stage-exams/
How did you design the criteria and weighting of the assessment?
The total weighting of the summative midterm is only 20% of the module. This makes it high-stake enough for students to engage, but not so much that they stress too much about it.
The division of the weighting for the two parts of the exam are:
| Part | Individual or group | Percentage weighting (%) | Time (mins) |
| 1 | Individual | 75 | 75 |
| 2 | Group | 25 | 75 |
How did you organise the assessment?
What: as above, the exam is divided into two parts:
- Students answer the questions individually as in a classic examination situation.
- They retake the exam in groups with the same questions and some extra questions. * The idea is that they will discuss the answers, developing collaborative skills honing problem solving (while first having had the opportunity to work through these alone for deeper thought) and explain to peers as part of the ethos of peer teaching.
Two-stage exams, when done at university, are mainly done at UG level without any extra questions. However, I wanted to take the opportunity at level 7 to do something differently in the group part by adding an extra, more conceptual and open-ended part which was not on the first exam. This was to facilitate risk taking and develop problem-solving approaches.
When: the exam takes place around week 6 to coincide with the university reading week, but our programme does not have one. It is therefore somewhat easier to book a room for the exam, and we do not have to go through central timetabling for midterms.
How: There are around 15-25 students in the module so I can run this alone. It can run up to 40 with one teacher but once you have more students than that, you would need GTAs to assist.
For a larger group, I would group them randomly but because this is a small cohort, by week 5, I had a chance to get to know their strengths and weaknesses a bit more, so I try to mix the groups based on this knowledge. I also want to break up any cliques that may have formed in class, so they have the opportunity to work with different people and avoid any dominance or reliance on those they perceive as ‘stronger’.
How long: The students have 75 mins for each part of the exam. They don’t need more time for the discussion part because they have already seen the questions, so I kept the time the same.
How did you support the students with this new form of assessment?
Students are prepped with formative worksheets each week for the types of exam questions. I gave them the exam information and rationale for what I was doing in this assessment in the first week.
The exam, although summative, serves a formative purpose, so it deliberately asks questions that makes them reflect about their misunderstandings and correct them before the 80% final exam. I use some similar question types to help them prep BUT as mentioned above, the lower stake nature of this assessment and the nature of group work allows me to address a programme level learning outcome of developing a problem-solving mindset through including more open-ended questions than the final exam because group work facilitate discussion and taking risks. Normally, this learning outcome is not very well evaluated at the programme levle otherwise.
I am aware that students may need some support and scaffolding for this type of collaborative group work at UG level, but there is a slightly different level of maturity on the MSc and MSci programmes that meant in this case, it didn’t really seem necessary and we didn’t have any trouble with groups within the exam or negative feedback about the group elements in the past 3 years. I would probably need more support on UG programmes, for example by having a mock version a week earlier.
How do you give feedback?
One of the main benefits of a two-stage exam is that feedback is instant as they retake the exam and discuss with their peers.
For more formal feedback, I mark both parts of the exam prior to the next class and then give feedback on the cohort, both via the KEATS page and in class. This allows me to address commonalities, which is a key time saver but also facilitates their metacognition on what areas they need to work on as individuals. More practically, I am unable to give the exam papers back to the students as I may need to provide them to external examiner. They know that they can come to me during office hours for more individual and specialised feedback if they choose, and to consult their exam paper.
Usually, exams are an assessment which provide minimal feedback, but I try to give people comments so they can learn from their mistakes and what they have done correctly.
What benefits did you see?
- Student Engagement: I noticed that students engaged more in class after the exam than before. Perhaps by working in groups and exposing ideas to one another, they felt more confident and comfortable with the whole class. Also, having ‘gone through’ the same experience, there may have been more of a sense of belonging. But I can’t really claim one reason why this may be the case. Comments from an internal module survey that I conducted revealed some students thought the assessment made them start studying earlier so they were more up to date with the module content.
- Group Cohesion: I was surprised that they didn’t defer to each other and when monitoring the group work elements, I didn’t notice freeriding, although of course I could not say for sure through only observation.
Student views:
“It’s nice to spread assessments out instead of one concentrated exam.”
“A useful tool that avoid leaving study till the end and can get a strong understanding of the earlier usually preliminary material”
“I have realized that I have done some mistakes in first part or forgot something, which other people from my team haven’t.”
“Usually the differences were more of a matter of rigour where perhaps my answer might be correct in essence initially. It lacked some elements that were an oversight on my behalf”
What challenges did you encounter and how did you address them?
- Inclusivity: There was an immediate concern about students with King’ Inclusion Plans (KIPs) or Personal Assessment Arrangements (PAA)who needed extra time. We addressed this by giving extra time for the individual but not for the group (part of the group work is working out how to work together to accommodate each other, sharing tasks etc so I did not feel this should warrant extra time based on the particular students’ disclosed cases this year). I booked two rooms next to each other and the students with PAA start earlier rather than finish later so everyone could start the group element at same time.
- One student commented that they did not like having a mid-term exam (this is not specific to a two-stage exam) because they said it turned attention to this exam rather than focusing on the other modules (other modules didn’t have summative mid-term). This is something supported by research (e.g Jessop and Tomas, 2016) and something to consider at the programme level to ensure deadlines do not clash and are not detracting from formative work in other modules, etc.
What are your next steps?
Although I will not be running this module again next year unfortunately, ideally I think a larger group work component would be better for this assessment. Currently the group work element is only 25% of a 20% weighted exam so is less of an incentive. But this would require more scaffolding of how to work in groups.
Generally, I am happy with this assessment for the type of module.
What advice would you give to colleagues wanting to implement this type of assessment?
- The best place to try something like this would be for a level 6 or 7 module, especially because of the more open-ended questions that require more synthesis than I would expect from first and second year students. For level 4 and 5 modules, I would run the two-stage examination in the “classical” way, giving students a subset of the original questions with no extra questions.
- Consider the process of Module modification for assessment changes in the department. The process can take a long time and is sometimes in my view a hindrance to innovation! You might want to try something like this as a formative first to see if it works but be aware you are not likely to get the same engagement from students and there are variables that differ between formative and summative such as availability of GTAs etc.
- There are some elements that would be more logistically tricky and add to workload with a larger cohort, for example, the type of room, the number of GTAs required and the marking time/turnaround.
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