12 September 2014: Finland's national matriculation exams goes electronic

This session was part of the joint eAssessment Scotland and Transforming Assessment online conference, 8 to 19 September 2014.

Presenter: Matti Lattu, Matriculation Examination Board, Finland

Hosted by Prof Geoffrey Crisp, Dean T&L, RMIT University and Dr Mathew Hillier, University of Queensland, Australia starting 07:00AM UST/GMT. Duration 56 Minutes.

This session covered the progress being made in computerising he Finnish upper secondary school national final exam. The test is organized by a national Matriculation Examination Board which makes the exams and coordinates the evaluation. This exam will change gradually to an e-exam between years 2016-2019. A lot of characteristic properties of a high stakes exam will remain the same: the test will be arranged simultaneously in more than 400 localities, scoring will be done by two independent evaluators and the results have a great importance when applying to higher education. The technical architecture of the exam will be decentralised. Each exam locality has its own offline test server. The encrypted package of questions and test takers' profiles will be loaded beforehand. The test takers use x86 laptops to connect to the server. All students have equal and compatible programs as the laptops are running a USB-based Linux operating system. After the test the answers are transferred to the centralised evaluation service which is used by roughly 7000 for scoring. Generally the upper secondary teachers understand the need of change but all adjustments to this high stakes test cause a great anxiety among the teachers. To tackle this we visited roughly 4000 upper secondary staff members during the first year of the project (there are 8000 upper secondary teachers in Finland). This autumn we are launching a trainers' programme to boost the training and information at schools. We are also shipping the first preliminary version of the test system by the end of the year. The test takers' operating system has already been downloadable for a year.

Further information

• Slide Set: eAS_12_sept_2014_slides.pdf [1MB]
• Session chat log: eAS_12_sept_2014_chat_log.txt
• Digabi project (in Finnish): https://digabi.fi/
• Digabi downloads: http://sourceforge.net/projects/digabi/
• Digabi source code: https://github.com/digabi
• Finland Matriculation Board (in English): http://www.ylioppilastutkinto.fi/fi/english

Session Recording

You Tube version

A screen cast of the session.

Start playing via You Tube: http://youtu.be/3Qpp_YOT80Q (You can choose to view in standard definition or high definition and in full screen mode).

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