Assessment
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Assessment at university level should serve two purposes. The first is to determine students' level of performance - to assign marks and grades and to ultimately decide whether a student has met the criteria for the award of a degree or diploma. This is known as summative assessment. The second purpose is formative, that is to assist students to learn, to deepen their understanding, challenge their misconceptions and develop new attitudes and ideas. Feedback is crucial to the formative side of assessment.
Assessment Methods
There are many different ways of assessing students, each of which has its own strengths and weaknesses. It is important to keep in mind that assessment can be a valuable educational tool if it is used as a means of giving students feedback on their performance that enables them to improve.
The way in which we choose to assess our students should depend largely on what and how we want them to learn. It has been demonstrated that the assessment system we choose strongly affects how students approach their learning.
The IML website http://www.iml.uts.edu.au/ includes assessment resources and information about different assessment methods, along with examples and a discussion of assessment issues.
Assessment Feedback
Giving helpful feedback to students can be an extremely time consuming task. It can be useful, particularly for research assignment or essay-based assessment tasks, to design a structured marking scheme which can be given to students at the time of setting the task, and then used to give structured feedback. A carefully designed feedback sheet can be used for all students, even when assignment topics differ. Model answers can be given for assessment tasks which involve answering specific questions where the range of answers is limited.
It is also important for feedback to be timely. Students have a right to know how they are going in a subject, and are entitled to be given feedback on any early assessment tasks on which later ones depend, in sufficient time to avoid compounding misconceptions. Some staff have personal rules about always returning student work (other than theses and major projects) within one or two weeks of submission. Whether or not you choose to adopt this type of system it is important to let students know when they can expect work to be returned, and to keep to this timing.
Try to develop assessment methods that encourage students to be critical of their own thinking and work. Using peer and self assessment recognises the students ability to assess their own changing understanding and helps them to become autonomous, life long learners.
Disputes
Sometimes a student will be dissatisfied with the grade you have given a piece of work. The first step to take when this happens is to ask the student to resubmit the work. Be open to the possibility that you may have erred, but make it clear to the student that your reconsideration will be completely 'open' and could result in your giving a lower mark than you initially gave. If you see no reason to increase the mark you have given, discuss the matter fully and frankly with the student, explaining why you think the mark is correct, and offering constructive comment on how they could attain a better mark in future. If the student is still unwilling to accept your mark, offer to have it considered by another member of staff, if possible the subject co-ordinator. If this does not resolve the dispute, take the matter up with your Head of School. Some Schools have quite formal procedures for the resolution of such disputes.
Cheating
The procedures for dealing with cheating in formal exams are outlined in the booklet Formal Examinations and in the University Calendar. These provide a good model, with appropriate adaptation, for informal exams. A point that should be noted is that students suspected of cheating are innocent until proven guilty. They should therefore be allowed to complete the exam if they wish. If the allegation is sustained, then their exam is rendered null and void; if it is not sustained then the student has not been unfairly penalised.
Another form of cheating is plagiarism in essays and assignments. Plagiarism can be very difficult to detect, and even more difficult to prove, especially if the work has been plagiarised from another student whose work is being assessed by another member of staff. Students often have difficulty in understanding what plagiarism is, especially in their first year at university. Practices which are regarded as plagiarism at university, such as the wholesale transcription of passages from textbooks without acknowledgment, are regarded as legitimate in some secondary schools. There is often a fine line between co-operation among students - itself a positive thing - and mutual plagiarism. Students need to have these issues explained and discussed. They also have the right to know what procedures and penalties apply in cases of wilful plagiarism. These vary between schools. Inquire at school level for details.