In at the Deep End - Starting to teach in Higher Education

Table of Contents

1. Welcome
2. Section 1: Learning
3. Section 2: Teaching
4. Section 3: Assessment
   1. Assessment, marking and feedback to students
   2. Summative and formative assessment
   3. Assessment matters to students
   4. The sharp end of learning and teaching
   5. Fit-for-purpose assessment is valid, reliable, transparent and authentic - and manageable!
   6. Beyond exams, essays and reports
   7. Setting questions for essays and exams
   8. Designing marking schemes
   9. Marking students' work
   10. Making the most of feedback to students
   11. Maximising learning payoff through feedback
5. References

Beyond exams, essays and reports

Traditionally in higher education in the UK, there has been perhaps too much emphasis on written assessment, and students' qualifications have depended too much on their skills relating to quite a narrow range of ways of demonstrating their achievement of the intended learning outcomes: answering exam questions, writing essays and writing reports. There are many alternatives, including:

• computer-marked multiple-choice tests or exams: once set up, the computer handles all the marking, and can even cause feedback to be printed out for candidates as they leave the test venue, or indeed give them instant on-screen feedback if the main purpose is feedback rather than testing. Care has to be taken, however, when designing multiple-choice questions for testing purposes, and the questions are known to discriminate reliably between students at different ability levels in the subject concerned
• short-answer exams or tests: these reduce the effect of students' speed of writing, and can cover a greater breadth of syllabus in a given assessment element than when long answers are required
• annotated bibliographies: for example where students are asked to select (say) the most relevant five sources on a particular idea or topic, then review them critically, comparing and contrasting them in only (say) 300 words. This can cause students to think more deeply about the topic than they may have done if writing a 3,000-word essay (and the annotated bibliographies are much faster to mark)
• portfolios of evidence: these can take even longer to assess than essays or reports, but can test far more than mere essay-writing or report-writing skills
• oral presentations: these focus on important skills that would not be addressed or assessed through written assessment formats
• in-tray exams: much more 'real life' testing situations, where instead of a question paper on the exam-room desk there is a collection of paperwork, which students study and use to answer relatively short, sharp decision-making questions which are issued every now and then during the exam
• open-book (or 'open-notes') exams where students don't have to rely on memory, and have with them the texts or notes of their choice (or a known-in-advance selection of texts and handouts), and where the exam questions test what they can do with the information already on their desks
• vivas (oral exams) which can be a better measure of students' understanding, as their reactions to on-the-spot questions are gauged and there is no doubt about the authenticity of their answers (such doubts can colour the assessment of various kinds of written work)
• poster displays where students' individual or collaborative design and originality can be among the attributes measured.

This is not an exhaustive list. There are many other forms of assessment and the UCPPD/Postgraduate Certificate in Learning and Teaching in HE team can refer you to other examples and references. One you may want to look at is 53 Interesting Ways to Assess Your Students (Habeshaw, Gibbs & Habeshaw, 1995).