Assessment Paths in Inspera Assessment support continuous assessment, allowing you to group components of an assessment to be marked individually and graded as a whole. 

This article provides an overview of Assessment Path use cases, details supported features, defines key terminology, and outlines technical compatibility and limitations with IIB and SEB.

Understanding Assessment Paths

Assessment path supports continuous assessment in either a formative (assessment for learning) or summative (assessment for learning) context. It allows you to group components of an assessment together to be marked individually and graded as a whole. It also supports multiple assessments being grouped in the same way.

Use cases for Assessment Paths

There are two use cases for Assessment Paths:

• It allows educators to conduct a series of assessments where candidates are evaluated based on their performance over a period of time.

  Example: All assessments planned for a course in a term or semester can be grouped together, each with its unique weight, to provide an overall grade to the candidate for the course.

• It can be used for summative assessments consisting of several components, each with its own time window, duration, graders, and feedback.

  Example: For language proficiency assessments, you might have 4 parts assessing reading, writing, listening, and speaking skills. Reading, writing, and listening could be conducted as one continuous multi-part assessment (same time window), while the speaking test is scheduled at a different time, all under one Assessment Path.

Supported features of Assessment Paths

Assessment Paths support a range of functionalities for comprehensive assessment management:

• Flexible scheduling: Schedule assessments with components that are graded as a whole.
• Candidate and contributor management: Candidates can be added to the whole assessment path or to individual tests for flexibility, while contributors (e.g., authors, invigilators, graders) can be added to the whole assessment.
• Grading committees: Grading committees can be added to the whole assessment for streamlined marking.
• Automatic overall grade calculation: The assessment's overall grade is automatically calculated based on a threshold, taking into account the weighted marks of each individual test.
• Candidate results overview: Candidates can view a summary of results and feedback for the whole assessment and individual tests in their candidate dashboard.
• New candidate dashboard: A new candidate dashboard that provides a better overview of all assessment activities is being introduced to "house" all assessments in one place. It also comes in a new improved design. During the beta period, the new candidate dashboard will coexist with the old one, and candidates will be directed to the new dashboard for the Assessment Path until the full transition.
• New Open API: A new Open API is available to create multi-component assessments.

Key definitions

• Test: In Inspera Assessment, you can create individual tests. Once you have created tests, you can add them to an Assessment Path.
• Assessment Path: A container that includes multiple tests and provides a structure for organizing and managing the overall assessment. An Assessment Path is designed to measure a candidate’s knowledge, skills, or abilities in a particular subject or field over a period of time.

Compatibility with IIB

Assessment Path is compatible with both IIB and SEB. This means that children of an Assessment Path test can be set to be taken on IIB or SEB.

There are two limitations:

• The Room Scan feature does not work, meaning that enabling or disabling this feature will result in the same outcome. The reminder of the assessment and features will work as expected.
• Assessment Path is not compatible with live proctoring.