We asked our Fellows to write us a short blog about their background and what they are doing as part of their BILT Fellowship. The following blog is from Helen Heath, who has been a BILT Fellow since September 2017.
Programme Level Assessment – A return to finals?
The summative assessment degree started on a Thursday morning with a bell ringing. At that point the waiting students were able to run to their allocated desks and start writing. I was elbowed out of the way by someone I’d considered to be a friend for three years. The summative assessment for my degree concluded, seven exam papers later, the following Monday lunchtime. Seven papers in four and a half days with a Sunday “off” after the first six exams. I don’t think anyone ever explained how the various papers contributed to the overall mark and I’ve certainly never had a transcript. “The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.”1
I can testify that finals were not stress free.
I am currently a BILT academic fellow considering programme level assessment. This is not a return to finals but a rethink about how to design and implement assessment of programmes. In the past I have worked with programme directors as a “critical friend” during the development stage of programmes. No programme director sets out to design a programme with an incoherent and inappropriate assessment regime that puts too much stress on students and doesn’t assess the skills or knowledge that they hope students will acquire or provide the formative assessment they need to develop. The new programme directors I worked with were all keen to devise appropriate assessments, in quantity and level, with some innovation in assessment methods to provide good quality feedback in novel and helpful ways. However, programmes don’t always remain as designed.
We are aware that students are stressed. Their work load at times is difficult to cope with and they also struggle to cope with the many different demands. At the same time university staff are struggling to provide meaningful feedback to increasing cohorts of students. We are advised to reduce assessment load, but students want more feedback. A solution could be more formative assessment and less summative. If we move to more formative assessment and less summative, the summative becomes more high-stakes and therefore, presumably, more stressful.
Jessop and Tomas2 write “The idea that well-executed formative assessment could revolutionise student learning has not yet taken hold.” This paper also suggests that a large variety in assessment can cause students confusion. Here, a programme level approach for design of formative and summative assessment might help.
As an example, in my subject area it is considered that weaker students do better on course work. In exams with numerical questions students may not be able to start a question or to get it completely wrong. In order to improve performance on their unit a lecturer may introduce some element of summative course work. There are examples in the literature of this being very successful. From personal experience, when one lecturer introduced a continuous summative assessment, through problem sheets, to a 4th year unit, the performance on that unit improved. A success! Except in this case students reported spending so much time on this one unit that the other units suffered. A possibly more serious consequence is that all lecturers see the success of the approach and students end up swamped in course work.
I’d also suggest that the frequently-heard complaint that students only do work that is assessed is much more likely to be true when the work that’s assessed takes up most of their time. By over-assessing in order that the work is done we ensure that unassessed work isn’t done. A move towards programme level assessment would develop programme teams with an overall view of how the programme is assessed; to move from a model where the unit is owned by a lecturer to one where the programme is owned by a team and where there isn’t competition to get students to work on “your unit”.
In my school we are taking a step backwards by removing the assessed course work element from the core lecture units in our first year. Work will still be submitted for formative feedback. The change from historic practice is that students are required to engage with the work to pass the unit, but the marks won’t count. The aim is to move students to using the course work as a formative exercise, using it to identify where they are having conceptual difficulties rather than (as is anecdotally the case) searching on the Internet for a very similar solved problem to copy without understanding, just to secure the additional marks. Working on the problems is the learning experience, not writing down the correct answers. What will happen? Watch this space.
1 L.P. Hartley, The Go-Between
2 Jessop, T. and C. Tomas (2017). “The implications of programme assessment patterns for student learning.” Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education 42(6): 990-999.
