One of the processes where things quickly began to go wrong was the assessment and examination process. Since this is such an important process, the team took a closer look at it. Together with all stakeholders, they examined the problems, their causes, and possible solutions.

“Martijn and Jeffrey tackled this very thoroughly,” Brouwer recalls. “For every problem, they kept asking ‘why?’ That’s how we discovered that various problems always had the same root cause—and that there were also problems with multiple root causes. It was very enlightening.”

All themes, challenges, root causes, ideas for improvement, actions, and responsibilities were compiled into a list of improvements, which served as a kind of improvement plan for this process.

“Many problems turned out to be surprisingly easy to solve,” says Brouwer. “Let’s send students an instructional video on how to register for exams. Or: let’s include the review period for exams in our academic calendar as well. But of course, there are also more challenging issues that require us to develop new policies.”

For example, fraud detection and online testing required extra attention. Brouwer: “How do we ensure that instructors know the correct steps to take to identify plagiarism? What steps should a teacher take if they suspect plagiarism? When is reporting mandatory? And when it comes to online assessments: as a teacher, when should you use which type of assessment? What can you leave to specialized software—and what shouldn’t you? Now that we have a clear overview again, we can develop very targeted policies for this.”