Digital assessment offers many benefits over and above traditional pen and paper assessment, but most notable is the data and analytics it can provide so easily. 

With Connect, you can gain insight into how much (or little) your students are studying outside of class and identify concepts they may be struggling with right from day one, helping you keep track of individuals even in large cohorts and respond accordingly. 

McGraw Hill has partnered with Proctorio to seemlessly deliver assessment integrity tools within Connect including browser-locking capabilities, remote proctoring (recording of student behaviour and actions during the assessment) and identity verification. 

Available for business and economics subjects, algorithmic questions involve a step-by-step procedure usually requiring adjustment or computation of parameters to produce an answer - where each student gets a different set of values, preventing them from copying each other.

Algorithic worksheets are marked with an orange icon in Connect to make it easy to identify them.

Questions in the Connect test bank are tagged according to Bloom's taxonomy, to show you not only whether students have managed to memorise information, but that they also understand it and can analyse, evaluate and apply it.

Where appropriate, Connect also includes essay style questions for instructor grading, to help you assess your students' analytical and acacdemic skills all in one place.

Add your own questions into the test bank too for added stretch.

Help students improve their conceptual understanding and written communication skills with McGraw Hill Connect’s Writing Assignments. Integrate writing skill development into your course with ease and help your students gain the critical writing skills they need for success now and beyond. Assign, monitor, mark, and provide feedback all in one place.

With porfolio assessments already common in vocational and technical education, the potential for Higher Education to reimagine assessment according to what is most important to measure is enormous, with technology facilitating innovative approaches that would not have been possible a decade ago.  This includes:

Video capturing software that facilitates video submissions for selling, management and business communications courses.

The analytics and business software tool exercises in Connect - such as data analytics labs, integrated Excel exercises, and virtual labs - enable you to assess application skills in a secure environment.

Meanwhile, our big immersive virtual reality games such as Practice Marketing, Practice Operations and The Business Strategy Game are often used as the basis for ongoing project-based assessment, with grade allocated according not only to performance in the game, but also to teamwork and collaboration skills, and students' ability to reflect on and analyse their performance.

Our technology and product development teams are always looking to add new features and capabilities to the platform to meet instructors' needs.

An increasingly common complaint that we've been hearing from intructors over the past years is that too many students are disengaged from their studies, not doing essential pre-work and reading before class, and not putting in a consistent effort across the semester, instead cramming last minute before exams.

A number of instructors who use Connect are seeing success at tackling this by tying the completion of work in the platform to students' final grade, either as a direct percentage or a weighting. 

While we might wish such incentivisation were unneccessary, instructors are finding that the ends more than justify the means, with students coming better prepared to class and class time being therefore more productive. There is both qualitative and quantitative evidence that this is having a noticely positive effect on student outcomes.   

Find out more about how Connect can be used to boost student motivation and engagement - and the impact his has had at some of our partner institutions.

When faced with undergraduate classes numbering into the hundreds, how do you keep track of how students are doing? Especially in a hybrid world with declining attendance on campus?

One of the major advantages of using a platform like Connect to set assignments is the trackability and analytics, allowing you to see how much or how little students are engaging, and crucially how well they're mastering concepts.

On top of the analytics from the questions embedded in SmartBook assignments, the Connect test bank can also be to set continuous, formative assessments as a mandatory, integrated part of the programme, ensuring students pace their learning and giving you additional insight. 

Wouldn't it be lovely if you could offer students a personalised learning journey, paced according to their needs, focusing in on the specific areas they struggle with? Of course without an army of teaching assistants that's simply not humanly possible with large cohorts.

Connect uses adaptive technology to match learning to the student's needs. In addition, when it comes to revision the system will remember what they struggled with and what they mastered easily, directing their efforts accordingly.