The ‘Assessment Programme’ must be aligned to the school’s vision, mission, curriculum, teaching and learning. The assessment programme, with its examination blueprint(s), ensures that all outcomes are assessed and by appropriate tools.

Faculty or staff development, formative assessments, remediation processes and feedback loops remain key. Question banks and quality assurance processes need continuous revitalisation.

Fair, transparent, assessment policies, formulated with stakeholders, should be in the public domain. Robust Assessment Programmes are dependent on standardization, objectivity and standard setting, and need multiple assessments by multiple assessors, multiple times for unbiased and longitudinal profiling of students.

Assessment programmes should have built-in continuous monitoring and quality improvement elements. It is critical for educational institutions and examination bodies to find innovative, resilient and sustainable practices for on-line assessments to continue to aspire for excellence in student assessment as they move to a new norm today and beyond these challenging times.

At AKU, Dr Zuberi led the curricular change to a competency-based integrated curriculum and assessment programme, which received the ASPIRE-to-Excellence Awards in Student Assessment and in Student Engagement, from the Association of Medical Education in Europe (AMEE).

As Associate Dean, she initiated a centralized Question-bank, AKU’s state-of-the-art Simulation-Lab (CIME), and a Masters in Health Professions Education, where she directs the Advanced Level Courses on Assessment.

Prof Zuberi chaired the Higher Education National MBBS curriculum revision (2011), and was member Curriculum Committee of the Pakistan Medical and Dental Council (2008-2011). She received a life-time achievement award in medical education (2013).

Currently, she serves as Director National Residency Program, South, College of Physicians and Surgeons, Pakistan; Member Executive Committee, Association of Medical Education Eastern Mediterranean Region; Member Aspire Academy, Aspire Assessment Panel and the Aspire Board, AMEE.

Most of the traditional educational assessments were paralyzed by the pandemic as they could not pivot quickly to an online delivery. On the other hand, digital-first assessments turned out to be a perfect solution in the time of transition. Digital-first assessments are assessments that are delivered online, anytime, anywhere.  Such assessments have a strong focus on the test taker’s experience while adhering to the psychometric and validity standards for high-stakes assessments. Many features of the digital-first assessments are enabled by the use of what we call, human-in-the-loop AI, such as automated item generation, automated scoring of text, speech, and video, detection of prepared generic responses, etc. Human subject matter expertise for the design and evaluation of each of these processes and methods blended with the AI affordances to scale up and speed up the development, administration and scoring of the test led to a new paradigm for testing. In digital-first assessments, the use of AI-technologies are the backbone of the whole assessment. AI supports test development, from test design through data collection through scoring and reporting. It is not  an after-thought enhancement to the test. 

In addition, digital-first assessments rely on integrative frameworks that help align the theory with the design, data collection, and scoring. One of these frameworks is computational psychometrics which blends psychometrics and machine learning methods to ensure that the test is reliable and valid for its uses.

In this talk, I will describe and discuss how AI technologies are used for digital-first assessment development and scoring while satisfying the psychometric constraints for reliability, targeted difficulty, validity, and fairness.

Two publications, a co-edited volume on Computerized Multistage Testing (2014) and an edited volume on test equating, Statistical Models for Test Equating, Scaling, and Linking (2011) were selected as the winners of the Division D Significant Contribution to Educational Measurement and Research Methodology award at American Educational Research Association (AERA).  Additionally, she has written and/or co-edited five other books and volumes on statistics and psychometric topics. In 2020, von Davier was awarded a Career Award from the Association of Test Publishers (ATP). In 2019 she was a Finalist for the Visionary Award of EdTech Digest.

Prior to Duolingo she was a Chief Officer at ACT, where she led ACTNext, a large R&D-innovation unit. Before that von Davier was a Senior Research Director at Educational Testing Service (ETS) where she led the Computational Psychometrics Research Center. Previor to that, she led the Center for Psychometrics for International Tests, where she was responsible for the psychometrics in support of international tests, TOEFL® and TOEIC®, and for the scores reported to millions of test takers annually.

Von Davier is currently the president of the International Association of Computerized Adaptive Testing (IACAT) and she serves on the board of directors for the Association of Test Publishers (ATP). She is a mentor with New England Innovation Network , Harvard Innovation Labs, and with the Programme via:mento at the University of Kiel, Germany.

She earned her doctorate in mathematics from Otto von Guericke University of Magdeburg, Germany, and her master of science degree in mathematics from the University of Bucharest, Romania.

And what is the relevance (if any) to assessment “insiders” of the wider debates in current public and academic life, such as “culture wars” and critical race theory? Isabel will address these questions, building on the thinking in “Is Assessment Fair, which she co-authored with Stuart Shaw. She will present fairness as a societal concept and suggest that assessment needs to be seen as “situated” in its context when considering fairness. She will discuss Mislevy’s concept of “conditional fairness” in this context. In conclusion, she will pose some fairness challenges to the audience, in the hope that these can be applied to other topics in the conference and to the professional and academic work of delegates.

She was the founding CEO of Ofqual, the statutory regulator of examinations and qualifications in England, and for three years she worked for Cambridge Assessment in SE Asia, based in Singapore. Isabel has served on the Boards of Governors of three UK universities, and has continued to pursue her academic interests, notably in ethical issues and their application to education and social policy. She serves on two committees advising the UK Government on ethics.   Isabel is an Affiliated Lecturer at the University of Cambridge and the co-author, with Stuart Shaw, of “Is Assessment Fair?”, published by SAGE in 2020.