End of school exams set to go digital in 2021 for South Australia’s Year 12s

More SA students will put away their pens and tackle their exams digitally, but STEM students will be among the last to sit e-exams.

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The majority of Year 12 exams will be done on computer by 2021, as the SACE Board ramps up its nation-leading bid to make electronic assessment the norm.

And next year will be the first time most Year 12s who face exams will do at least one of them on screen.

The Sunday Mail can reveal biology, the second-most popular Year 12 subject, with almost 3300 students sitting the exam this year, will be among six to switch from the traditional pen and paper next year.

The others are legal studies, nutrition, geography, tourism and Indonesian, which will be the first foreign language with an electronic exam.

In an Australian first, English literary studies was the first SACE subject to have a computer exam in 2018, joined this year by psychology and modern history.

Next year’s additions mean about 8000 Year 12s – roughly 60 per cent of those doing subjects with exams – will do one or more on computer. This year it was about 5600 students, or around 40 per cent.

SACE Board chief executive Martin Westwell said adding a subject as popular as biology would significantly spread the reach of exam reform.

“Lots of schools will be touched by it that perhaps haven’t been before,” he said.

Prof Westwell said the Board wanted “as many (exams) as we can” done electronically in 2021.

Indonesian was chosen as the first language because it uses the same Latin alphabet as English keyboards.

Ironically, STEM subjects including chemistry and various maths options will be among the last to make the technological leap, because it is difficult for students to produce complex formulas and chemical structures on screen quickly.

Prof Westwell said students were “overwhelmingly” in favour of computer exams, because that was how they did most of their work all year. And students benefited from markers not having to decipher their handwriting

He said in the short term electronic exams would be similar in format to traditional ones, as the Board was “treading carefully”.

But the longer term goal was to make exams more interactive and based on extended problem-solving scenarios.

Online exams are done on locked browsers, so students cannot access other resources.

Nearly half of Year 12 subjects do not have exams.