Insights into How Academics Reframed Their Assessment during a Pandemic: Disciplinary Variation and Assessment as Afterthought

COVID-19 caused substantial change in learning and teaching in higher education. In this article we explore how assessment changed in the initial semester of emergency remote teaching in an Australian university. Seventy academics responsible for courses (unit of study), representing a wide array of disciplines, completed an online survey at the end of the semester in June 2020. They answered questions regarding their experiences and actions in shifting their course online from face-to-face delivery at the point of the pivot online. A mixed methods approach identified that most academics did not change the composition and relative weighting of their assessment in response to the pivot. The dominant strategy was to translate existing on-campus assessment into an online format. The research provides insight into disciplinary norms for assessment and, we argue, signals how forms of assessment are valued based on their retention during a time of consequential change in pedagogy. For academics in our study, assessment was an afterthought to the more pressing focus on pedagogical interactions with students. Academic integrity matters were not a factor in their decision-making process during that initial move to remote emergency teaching. Linking assessment with pedagogy, whether online, on-campus and both, matters moving forward.