Case Study: Birmingham City University achieves accessible online exams and faster marking with TestReach

Birmingham City University uses TestReach to provide an outstanding candidate experience for students of all abilities

Birmingham City University (BCU), home to 24,000 students and a large School of Nursing and Midwifery, needed to move away from paper exams that did not serve an increasing number of students with disabilities and that made question management, test assembly and marking slow and difficult. To address this, BCU selected TestReach’s online assessment software — a cloud-based solution offering accessible delivery, authoring, marking and reporting.

TestReach was deployed for neonatal exams on the BSc (Hons) Midwifery programme (2-hour sessions combining multiple choice and short-text answers), with about 25% of the paper auto-scorable and the rest routed automatically to individual markers. TestReach’s automated workflows, on-screen mark schemes, full audit trails, moderation tools and detailed question statistics sped up marking and moderation, improved the candidate experience for students of all abilities, and made it easy to see the impact of mark adjustments on pass rates; BCU is now planning to expand TestReach to other courses.

Birmingham City University

Natasha Carr

Senior Midwifery Lecturer