Written by Jack Moran, Reimagine Education
Reimagine Education continually emphasizes the need to rethink teaching, learning, and how educational institutions prepare students for the workforce. Teaching and learning sit at the center of our conversations, submissions, plenaries, and panels during the December conference. Each year we gain a global perspective on how educators aim to transform these interconnected processes.
Innovation in education takes many forms. One of the most striking panels at the 2016 Reimagine Education conference explored alternative university models that fundamentally rethink higher education. For example, the Minerva Project led by Ben Nelson replaces a single fixed campus with a global, residentially rotating experience. Similarly iconoclastic, Brittany Bir’s 42 coding school has removed lectures, homework, and formal exams from its curriculum.
For most readers who have experienced traditional schooling, these shifts feel radical. Education is increasingly seen as a lifelong process, yet it typically promises measurable outcomes—grades or numerical marks—that signify attainment. That traditional assessment model has long attracted criticism. Some critics highlight the reductionism of exams and question whether they validly measure student learning. Others argue that grades place undue pressure on students. Teachers also point out that frequent assessment imposes significant time demands, contributing to workload and burnout.
Beyond workload concerns, many experts contend that conventional assessments fail to capture the competencies needed in the modern world. Initiatives such as the Assessment and Teaching of 21st Century Skills (ATC21S), based at the University of Melbourne, focus on testing skills that are hard to measure, often described as “twenty-first century” skills—collaboration, critical thinking, and other complex competencies.
Some institutions, like 42, bypass these problems entirely by eliminating examinations. Yet such radical models are unlikely to become the global norm in the near term. Traditional assessment remains predominant, and solutions that address system efficiency, validity, reliability, and the measurement of complex skills are valuable contributions to the field.
DigiExam
DigiExam is an example of a practical innovation aimed at improving assessment efficiency. It is a digital platform that enables exams to be administered and graded electronically. The potential benefits are clear: by reducing administrative burdens, teachers can reclaim substantial amounts of time.
When educators visit the DigiExam site they are prompted to consider how many classes they teach, how many students are in each class, and how many tests they administer annually. These details quickly reveal how many hours are consumed by marking. With teacher attrition and burnout a major concern in many education systems, tools that streamline assessment and grading can make a meaningful difference. DigiExam claims that educators can save up to half the time they would normally spend marking papers.
The platform is not limited to primary and secondary education. University academics also face competing pressures—research demands alongside expectations for high-quality teaching—and any effective tool that reduces grading time can help alleviate those pressures, even if it is not a complete solution.
DigiExam: the future of assessment?
DigiExam was a finalist at Reimagine Education in 2016 and won the Learning Assessment category. Founded in 2011 by Johan Hägglund and Nima Marefat, the company has raised venture funding, supported hundreds of thousands of exams, and been adopted by a large number of institutions. These figures underscore both the platform’s usability and its scalability—two criteria central to Reimagine Education.
The platform is primarily cloud-based but includes offline capabilities so students can complete exams without reliable internet access. Teachers can aggregate group results quickly, and the system also offers features aimed at sustainability and administrative efficiency. The move toward digital examinations seems inevitable, and DigiExam is well positioned within that trend.
AI and other possibilities
Yet DigiExam may represent only the beginning of a broader transformation in assessment. The platform supports both formative and summative testing, handles multiple-choice items efficiently, and provides a “student computer lockdown” mode to reduce cheating. These practical improvements matter, but they address practice rather than assessment theory.
Reports such as the AQA’s “The Future of Assessment: 2025 and Beyond” highlight a growing need to align assessment with teaching and to find ways to evaluate twenty-first century skills—collaborative problem-solving, group discussion, communication, and other competencies that are difficult to measure. These “hard-to-assess” skills pose theoretical and technical challenges for digital assessment.
For example, the OECD has experimented with assessing collaborative problem-solving using a digital agent that interacts with a test-taker via a chat box. The candidate’s actions, communications, and solutions are scored by the system. This approach reduces certain concerns about reliability and fairness because a computer assessor does not experience fatigue or obvious bias. However, it also raises questions about ecological validity: such simulations may omit the complex, social dynamics of real group work—tone, mood, existing hierarchies, and interpersonal bias—that influence collaborative performance.
Similar limitations apply to assessing group discussions. Voice recognition and analytics could measure how often a participant speaks, but frequency alone does not capture the quality, relevance, or impact of contributions. A truly valuable contribution might be a clarifying question, a de-escalating intervention, or an insight that integrates diverse perspectives—all of which require nuanced human judgment. While artificial intelligence will continue to improve, current technology struggles to replicate the depth of human evaluation in these complex social contexts.
Measuring hard-to-assess skills
The OECD’s experiments suggest that a wholesale move to digital assessment will be partial and gradual. As the theoretical emphasis shifts toward assessing complex skills in real contexts, digital tools may lag until they can capture those complexities reliably and validly. That said, advances in AI and clearer definitions of the constructs educators seek to measure will enable ed tech developers to build more sophisticated assessment solutions over time.
This does not diminish DigiExam’s achievements. It is an effective tool that significantly reduces time spent creating, administering, and grading exams, and it rightly received recognition for its potential to transform current practice. Instead, this analysis highlights how much further the educational technology sector can innovate in assessment.
To realize a future in which assessment is both valid and efficient, collaboration is essential. Employers must identify the skills their workforce will need and work with academics to define those skills precisely and determine how to measure them. The ed tech community—inside and outside academia—can then design tools that deliver valid, reliable assessments of complex competencies while minimizing the administrative and time burdens on educators.
Achieving that vision will require cross-sector cooperation, sustained research into assessment theory, and iterative development of digital systems. Platforms like DigiExam show that practical, scalable progress is possible now; the next challenge is ensuring that digital assessment evolves to capture the nuanced, human dimensions of twenty-first century skills.