TEQSA's 2025 guidance on assessment reform asked universities to explain how their assessments were secured without giving them much guidance on how to answer the question. For mostly online postgraduate programs with working cohorts like the ones I teach in, the return to examinations and oral assessment that most institutions have reached for are among the least suitable or feasible.

I developed a rough typology that sorts securing mechanisms by function. It groups thirteen mechanisms into six clusters: securing the person, the channel, the performance, the construct, the inference, and the disposition. The first five reduce a student's opportunity to misrepresent their learning, and the sixth works on motivation (which is outside the scope of securing assessments, but critical in achieving its broader goal). For each mechanism I set out its forms, strengths and limitations, and what it would mean for asynchronous online postgraduate public health and health management cohorts. I prepared it as a working document for our School to support our collective response and published it on my blog.

The typology was invited to be republished in HERDSA Connect, which goes to the members of the Higher Education Research and Development Society of Australasia. Within the School of Population Health it has informed the process securing of our programs in advance of TEQSA’s requirement coming into effect in 2027.

Sources

Dawson, P. (2021). Defending Assessment Security in a Digital World: Preventing E-Cheating and Supporting Academic Integrity in Higher Education. Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780429324178

Harris-Roxas, B. (2026, June 22). What does it actually mean to secure an assessment? https://harrisroxashealth.com/2026/06/what-does-it-actually-mean-to-secure-an-assessment/

Kane, M. T. (2013). Validating the interpretations and uses of test scores. Journal of Educational Measurement, 50(1), 1–73. https://doi.org/10.1111/jedm.12000