Diverging Assessment: A Student Perspective
Billingsley, W., Brankovic, L., Li, N., Paul, D., Sakzad, A., Skerritt, M. P., and Sheard, J. “Diverging Assessment: A Student Perspective”, the 30th ACM Conference on Innovation and Technology in Computer Science Education V. 1 (ITiCSE 2025), June 2025.
Abstract
Diverging assessment maintains a common question set for all students but varies the input data so that each student has a unique problem to solve. It is an approach in student assessment that offers a unique and authentic learning experience. Although such assessments have been implemented in computing courses, their effectiveness and students' perceptions in different contexts remain unexplored. In this paper, we investigate student perspectives on diverging assessment. We surveyed students in four courses across three different universities. Each surveyed student was enrolled in one of the four courses on networking, operation systems, digital forensics or ethical hacking. Each course featured at least one diverging assessment. The students' overall perceptions about diverging assessments and three different aspects of diverging assessment, namely authenticity, assessment-as-learning, and academic integrity, are surveyed, reported, and analyzed.
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