I landed in London on 7th September and took the train from Heathrow to King’s Cross and from there on to Cambridge. The seminar was conducted at Robinson College and we stayed in student accommodation at Robinson College itself.
Cambridge is a quiet University town with little traffic, gigantic medieval buildings and several colleges. Since the town is on the river Cam and each college has its own private bridge across the across the river Cam, its called Cambridge.
The River Cam
For those interested in trivia … there are 31 college under Cambridge University. The oldest is Peterhouse founded in 1284 and the newest is Robinson College founded in 1977. The richest is Trinity college with 700 million pounds in fixed assets. Incidentally Jawaharlal Nehru, Rajeev Gandhi and Amartya Sen studied at Trinity College. And it is featured in Harry Potter. The picture most often shown of Cambridge is the picture of Kings College and its chapel.
The key note address for the IAEA 2008 was by a Professor Mislevy from the US who spoke about the importance of defining what an “expert” and a “novice” in any given field are. This definition serves as the start point to create assessments and to interpret scores from an assessment. He went on to describe definitions arrived at for Architecture and Dentistry from his research. This research is of great use to test creators since it can help in creation of highly valid tests. You can read more about the key note address at
http://www.iaea2008.cambridgeassessment.org.uk/ca/digitalAssets/135859_Mislevy.ppt
Several other presentations were very interesting. There is a new e-marking software application that has become popular in the UK over the last couple of years. University and School examinations are corrected on computers. Once students complete an examination, the answer scripts are scanned using huge scanners at a central processing location. The images of the answer scripts are then uploaded into a workflow based software application. The answer script images are then assigned to teachers and freelance markers for corrections. With a software application similar to Outlook, teachers and freelancer markers can download the answer scripts onto their computers sitting at home or at work and pull up the answer script images on the computer and correct it. All scores are entered into the application which automatically validates and totals the scores and sends it back to the central server. This dramatically increases efficiency of correction by removing the need to physically ship answer script papers to teachers doing the corrections and by making some of the steps such as score totaling automatic. Further freelance markers can easily be hired and used for marking. Apparently a lot of corrections of UK student responses are done out of India and Australia.
Another interesting company is Vantage Laboratories (www.vantage.com) which offers a software solution for automatic correction of essay type answers. This application is being explored by the Product Development Team and we hope to see an integration into OnTrac soon.
On the tests side, there were very interesting presentations on whether abilities tests actually test aptitude, on the taxonomy of Critical Thinking Tests and the validity of different methods of deciding cutoffs. All the papers presented are available at
http://www.iaea2008.cambridgeassessment.org.uk/
My own presentation went very well. I opened with how overwhelmed I was to be presenting at Cambridge considering 2 or 3 of our Prime Ministers have studied at Cambridge ... a few smiles. I also said 'Cambridge is a metaphor in India for what is unachievable ... for instance if you speak English well in school, people would say "Dont speak like you studied at Cambridge'" ... this was greeted with a lot of smiles. I then presented on how we have setup Pariksha centers and how they are enabling us to deliver large volume online tests. People had several questions about scalability of the model, whether we would be interested in extending this model to Africa, whether the use of biometric was legal in India (it is illegal in the UK to collect biometric data) and so on. All in all, the audience was impressed with what we had done. (email me for a copy of the PPT)
Madan’s presentation too went well. Madan presented on the NACTech program that has helped in creating more employability in India. There were questions on whether India had a regulatory body and a standards definition body. People from the UK were glad that since there were no such bodies, more innovation seems to have happened.
There was also a gala dinner organized at King's College. Incidentally you cannot walk on the lawns of King College if you are a visitor. But we all were allowed to this as a special gesture. Also there is a private bridge for each college across the Cam where visitors are not allowed. We crossed this bridge too. Dinner was in a huge hall. 4 courses followed by coffee and brandy. There was also after dinner speeches. It was the real British experience. I had a senior person in Research at Cambridge Assessments to my right and Ugandans and Dutch around us. Truly international. You can see mine and Madan's head in the photo below - bottom right - second column of tables from the right. Click on the picture to see a full sized image.
On the lighter side, I and Madan stayed on the third (top) floor of a student hostel at Robinson College which for some reason has decided not to have a lift. So we climbed six flights of stairs every day! The rooms were comfortable. We also strayed into a rock music place one of the evenings at Cambridge. We had to leave after two songs … realizing that we weren’t as young as we used to be. And this was the first conference I attended where Madan did not know any body.
Several other presentations were very interesting. There is a new e-marking software application that has become popular in the UK over the last couple of years. University and School examinations are corrected on computers. Once students complete an examination, the answer scripts are scanned using huge scanners at a central processing location. The images of the answer scripts are then uploaded into a workflow based software application. The answer script images are then assigned to teachers and freelance markers for corrections. With a software application similar to Outlook, teachers and freelancer markers can download the answer scripts onto their computers sitting at home or at work and pull up the answer script images on the computer and correct it. All scores are entered into the application which automatically validates and totals the scores and sends it back to the central server. This dramatically increases efficiency of correction by removing the need to physically ship answer script papers to teachers doing the corrections and by making some of the steps such as score totaling automatic. Further freelance markers can easily be hired and used for marking. Apparently a lot of corrections of UK student responses are done out of India and Australia.
Another interesting company is Vantage Laboratories (www.vantage.com) which offers a software solution for automatic correction of essay type answers. This application is being explored by the Product Development Team and we hope to see an integration into OnTrac soon.
On the tests side, there were very interesting presentations on whether abilities tests actually test aptitude, on the taxonomy of Critical Thinking Tests and the validity of different methods of deciding cutoffs. All the papers presented are available at
http://www.iaea2008.cambridgeassessment.org.uk/
My own presentation went very well. I opened with how overwhelmed I was to be presenting at Cambridge considering 2 or 3 of our Prime Ministers have studied at Cambridge ... a few smiles. I also said 'Cambridge is a metaphor in India for what is unachievable ... for instance if you speak English well in school, people would say "Dont speak like you studied at Cambridge'" ... this was greeted with a lot of smiles. I then presented on how we have setup Pariksha centers and how they are enabling us to deliver large volume online tests. People had several questions about scalability of the model, whether we would be interested in extending this model to Africa, whether the use of biometric was legal in India (it is illegal in the UK to collect biometric data) and so on. All in all, the audience was impressed with what we had done. (email me for a copy of the PPT)
Madan’s presentation too went well. Madan presented on the NACTech program that has helped in creating more employability in India. There were questions on whether India had a regulatory body and a standards definition body. People from the UK were glad that since there were no such bodies, more innovation seems to have happened.
There was also a gala dinner organized at King's College. Incidentally you cannot walk on the lawns of King College if you are a visitor. But we all were allowed to this as a special gesture. Also there is a private bridge for each college across the Cam where visitors are not allowed. We crossed this bridge too. Dinner was in a huge hall. 4 courses followed by coffee and brandy. There was also after dinner speeches. It was the real British experience. I had a senior person in Research at Cambridge Assessments to my right and Ugandans and Dutch around us. Truly international. You can see mine and Madan's head in the photo below - bottom right - second column of tables from the right. Click on the picture to see a full sized image.
On the lighter side, I and Madan stayed on the third (top) floor of a student hostel at Robinson College which for some reason has decided not to have a lift. So we climbed six flights of stairs every day! The rooms were comfortable. We also strayed into a rock music place one of the evenings at Cambridge. We had to leave after two songs … realizing that we weren’t as young as we used to be. And this was the first conference I attended where Madan did not know any body.
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