Northern College Good Practice Guide in Teaching and Learning

15.1 The word 'assessment' is derived from the Latin ad sedere, meaning 'to sit down beside'. As its etymology implies, assessment is primarily concerned with providing guidance and feedback to students. Generally, assessment refers to any procedure used to estimate student learning for whatever purpose.

15.2 Assessment is a process that involves looking at, making inferences about and estimating the worth of a sample of students' work. The sample may include hand-written or typed essays, oral presentations, practical tasks, examination scripts, and so on. The work sampled may be specific to a course, may relate to general progress and may involve explicit or implicit assessment criteria. On the basis of the sample examined, it is possible to make inferences about the students' achievement, potential, ability, intelligence, motivation, learning style and, perhaps even, personality and to produce measures of worth in the form of grades, marks or levels.

The implication here is that an effective assessment methodology is one that addresses these problems

15.4 The Northern College's assessment methodology has undergone several modifications to reflect good practice. Thus, for example, with respect to the Diploma and Higher Education Programmes steps have been taken to address a number of problems:

Students are not overloaded with too many assignments.
Students are given enough time to complete assignments.
Students are made aware of what is expected of them.
Tutors provide students with appropriate levels of assistance in either one-to-one or group tutorials.
Tutors provide feedback to students on their assignments.
Tutors take into account any explicit assessment criteria or marking schemes.
Tutors finish written assessments in a specified time-period (namely, within three weeks of submission of assignments).
Student progress meetings are held to identify individual students' difficulties and to recommend action strategies for students who come to be 'at risk' because of not submitting assignments or not performing at acceptable levels.

15.5 Assessment can either empower students or damage them. Students might carry the scars of their earlier encounters with assessment, remembering for example that they had failed certain examinations or shown little or no aptitude for English composition. It is therefore important that assessment is seen as something that is not harmful to students but beneficial to tutors and students alike.

15.6 Tutors need to be aware of the range of assessment methods available to them (essay writing, short answer questions, multiple choice questions, practical exercises, examinations, vivas, and so on) and to select the most appropriate methods. In practice, they are likely to adopt a number of different methods instead of just one. The methods should be appropriate for the purposes for which they are intended. From the students' point of view the common purposes of assessment are:

The guiding principle in the design of assessment methods should be the provision of help to students.

15.7 Essay writing is the dominant mode of assessment for the College's Diploma and Higher Education Programmes; it is also used occasionally in short courses in the College's other programmes. Essays allow students to show a degree of creativity and individuality. It is important that tutors avoid the pitfalls of impressionistic marking when assessing essays. One way in which they do manage to accomplish this is to allocate points or marks to various aspects of essay writing, such as:

To further reduce the likelihood of subjective judgement, the tutors' first marking is undertaken against the College's overarching criteria of assessment, and this is again checked for validity and reliability in a verification exercise involving other tutors.

Formative assessment takes place during a course. It is intended to elicit diagnostic information about student learning - to gauge the strengths and weaknesses of performance and to provide feedback while there is still time to take action for improvement. The implication here is that if students are to know how to improve their future performance, tutors must identify areas for development and indicate next steps.
Summative assessment typically comes at the end of a course. It is intended to judge if the outcomes of a course have been achieved through the completion of essay writing, final examinations or some other mode of assessment. It leads to the award of a final mark, grade or level.

The assessment of students' work is usually formative and summative. Thus tutors provide feedback to students on their performance and award them marks, grades or levels that count towards their final achievement scores. The awards are checked by internal as well as external verifiers.

15.9 The College has, like other institutions in the adult and further educational sectors, opted to place emphasis on the following:

Coursework. A major advantage of coursework is that tutors obtain multiple points of assessment. Coursework also has the potential to measure the capacity to gather and select information from various sources, to deepen understanding and to develop skills vis-à-vis research, reading and writing.
Explicit assessment criteria. In various programmes of learning explicit criteria for measuring students' performance are increasingly used. If the criteria are known to tutors and not to students, uncertainty can develop among students as to whether the measure of their performance is adequate and fair. Also, the use of implicit criteria leads to impressionistic marking and this creates inconsistencies in the marking pattern amongst tutors.
Tutor-designed and student-agreed assessment procedures. Students are made aware of the requirements of a course and its assessment procedures. They are often asked to undertake self-assessment and to compare this with tutors' feedback and the award of marks, grades or levels so that they can develop a sense of ownership and commitment to the assessment methodology.
Process assessment. The assessment of process is usually formative but can be included in summative assessment. Students can, either on their own or with the help of tutors, assess their various process skills, such as timetabling, researching, reading, writing, collaborating with others, and so on.
Outcomes. The use of outcomes enables tutors to explore in a more open fashion student learning. Outcomes do not necessarily have to be tied to a specific performance variable and may include what other things have been learnt or achieved.
Skills. Whilst doing a course, students usually develop a cluster of skills which they can transfer to a variety of settings. The emphasis on skills provides a framework for identifying outcomes as well as the transferable skills and subject expertise that students require.
Prior learning. Students' prior learning may or may not have been assessed and/or certificated. It is based upon acknowledgement of and reflection on the acquisition of skills and knowledge in the past and the transferability of this to new settings. It can be used to gauge the students' readiness to enter a course or programme of learning and also for ascertaining how it enhances or even hinders student learning.

15.10 Tutors use the results of assessment for both judgmental and developmental purposes.

Given that assessors usually have varying and idiosyncratic marking techniques, it is important that care is exercised to ensure that assessment is consistent, uniform and fair both to individual students and to groups of students.

15.11 The design of the College's assessment methodology is such that it helps students to reflect on their performance and to chart their progress.

15.12 The College has developed a comprehensive monitoring system to ensure that its assessment methodology is rigorously and fairly applied on its Diploma and Higher Education Programmes. The system involves the second marking of student assignments together with the internal verification of assessment practices. On the part-time programmes the College has developed an internal moderation system in which the award of credits for a carefully chosen sample of short courses is checked and verified.