Characteristics of a 'Good' Assessment Programme
Who is assessment for? There are many stakeholders in assessment. Students are obviously stakeholders, because they submit work for feedback and grades. Teachers and tutors wish to monitor student progress and can receive feedback about the quality of the students' learning experiences from their assessment performance. Employers want to know how well students have done, as do professional bodies. In addition, the wider community wants to know that education is providing value for money and they gauge this through the assessment results. Institutions are subject to Quality Assurance and assessment is regarded as a major component in this.
The key factor in determining whether an assessment programme is good depends on whether the assessment tasks are relevant to the aims and intended learning outcomes for the course, not forgetting the attitudes and skills that are to be tested. Brown et al., (1997) declare some common weaknesses in assessment systems, providing a checklist against which assessment programmes can be verified.
Overload of students and staff
Too many assignments with the same deadline set in the department/school.
Insufficient time for students to complete the assignments in the time available.
Insufficient time for staff to mark the assignments before the next semester.
Inadequate or superficial feedback provided to students.
Wide variations in assessment demands of different modules.
Wide variations in marking across modules.
Wide variations in marking within a module.
Wide variations in marking by demonstrators.
Fuzzy or non-existent criteria.
Undue precision and specificity of marking schemes or criteria.
Students do not know what is expected of them.
Students do not know what is a good or bad assignment/project.
Assessment viewed by some departments/schools as an extra rather than a recognised use of staff time.
Project supervision seen as an extra or the real time involved is not recognised.
Students gauge the requirements of a course from the assessment that they are expected to do to attain that course:
'Assessment sends messages about the standard and amount of work required, and what aspects of the syllabus are most important. Too much assessed work leads to superficial approaches; clear indications of priorities in what has to be learned, provide fertile ground for deep approaches' (Ramsden, 1992:187-8).
Providing a range of assessment methods for students can make administration of assessment programmes more difficult, as it can prove difficult to combine marks from a number of different tasks, however, a range of methods is important to students, as this can accommodate the range of students learning preferences (Weavers, 2003).
Ideally any assessment should be valid, reliable, practicable, and fair and useful to the student. It should demonstrate whether and to what level students have met the intended learning outcome(s) of the course or programme.
Validity: The degree to which you are able to measure what you think you are measuring, and may require assessment within real life, and variable settings (Ashcroft and Palacio, 1996).
Reliability: the degree to which the scores of every individual are consistent over repeated applications of a measurement procedure and hence are dependable, and repeatable; the degree to which scores are free of errors of measurement.
Assessment should have a clear purpose, it should be clear what is being assessed and how the judgements are reached. It should enable the learner to review their progress in the light of the assessment criteria, and then plan for their further learning. It should also be subject to quality assurance procedures and allow the assessor to review teaching effectiveness. An outcome will be clear records of attainment which will be useful to all the stakeholders in assessment, as these will be required for the awarding of degrees or the achievement of professional certification.
The assessment should be based upon certain standards and these should be well articulated to form a reliable basis for determination of whether or not a student has achieved the learning outcomes of the educational programme. Simple ways of improving reliability in assessment include:
the use of more than one method to assess achievement (Rovai, 2000, Sim et al., 2004)
setting more, albeit smaller assessment items (Gipps, 2003, Weavers, 2003)
and the use of more than one assessor
When creating effective assessments a tutor should look into the nature of effective assessment. Brown and Knight (1994) suggest some requirements for creating effective assessment methodologies:
give full feedback, related to the criteria that has been established for the assessment in the first place,
identify with the student points for development,
generate and share criteria which blend departmental requirements with student priorities,
be supportive, foster intrinsic motivation, preferably by being interesting and enthusiastic,
grade rapidly - effective feedback is swift feedback.
All forms of assessment are problematic to some degree.
Continuously assessed work such as essays, projects and reports can be open to claims of plagiarism (Carroll, 2002 and
http://www.brookes.ac.uk/services/ocsd/4_resource/plagiarism.htm) and can be very time consuming to mark. Exams can encourage surface learning, guess work, and probably don't lead to effective long-term learning (Ashcroft and Palacio, 1996) as they generally do not include any elements of feedback, and are not returned to by students.
