Implementing Interactive Oral Assessments to enhance graduate outcomes and employability skills: Theme – Graduate outcomes and employability

The HE sector has been working to improve the link between assessments at university and the workplace as a commitment to developing 21st century graduates (OCED, 2018), in response to industry feedback (KPMG, 2020) on graduate skills, underpinned by the Federal government’s Jobs-ready graduates’ package (DESE, 2021). The challenge of administering online invigilated exams at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic prompted the HE sector to look for alternatives.
Interactive oral assessment (IOA) is an authentic assessment approach that involves a genuine, unscripted conversation between an assessor and a student(s) framed around a workplace scenario (Sotiriadou et al., 2020). It is proven to enhance student engagement and outcomes, as well as enhanced employability skills whilst improving academic integrity (Sotiriadou et al., 2020). It can be implemented as an individual or group assessment, as a formative or a summative assessment, and can be administered synchronously or asynchronously, and face-to-face or online (Logan et al., 2020). Academics are assured of their students’ knowledge and skills, and graduate attributes (Sotiriadou et al., 2020) in a way that cannot be evidenced in other traditional forms of assessment.
A university wide assessment redesign project was initiated to trial IOAs through a dedicated Community of Practice (CoP).
This presentation will showcase the initial outcomes of the first phase of a mixed methods, longitudinal study to assess the impact of IOAs on enhancing students’ employability skills and graduate attributes, as well as the staff experience of embedding IOAs in their subjects through a multi-disciplinary CoP.