Integrity and motivation in remote assessment

The shift to distance education during the COVID-19 pandemic highlighted the potential and preference of online learners for remote assessment. Yet, concerns about academic integrity, especially with tools like ChatGPT, prompted a reevaluation of remote evaluation methods. Universities responded by returning to on-campus exams or relying on technological surveillance, with the limits of such approaches from a pedagogical and values perspective. This research offers a third path, re-imaging with the main stakeholders in higher education (teachers, students, institutional leaders, and pedagogical experts) what quality remote assessment could look like in the future. To address this, we took a collaborative speculative design approach. The two-day workshop comprising 34 education stakeholders identified four key characteristics of quality remote assessments: (1) ensuring authorship, (2) designing meaningful assessments, (3) fostering a feeling of autonomy, and (4) reducing stress by fostering a feeling of competence and giving space for failure. We show that the last three characteristics align with the first two psychological needs of Self-Determination Theory (SDT), autonomy and competence. Thus, by designing assessments with such characteristics, teachers will support autonomous motivation and, consequently, engagement, performance, and academic integrity. However, the third need of SDT, relatedness, was largely overlooked and should be considered in further work. The results also highlight the need for structure and a space for failure, which may thwart autonomous motivation. Teachers must carefully balance these seemingly contradictory requirements of remote assessment design. Finally, the collaborative nature of the research led to a change in the practice of some participants.