Assessment

Continuing on from my last post regarding grading, I thought I would explore assessment more. I read the paper from the seminar called Fair Assessment Practices by Linda Suskie. In this paper, she listed seven steps to fair assessment. The first and second were to have clearly stated learning objectives and to match the assessment to these objectives. This concept of using assessment as a means of reinforcing your most important goals was something we discussed at the seminar, and, I think, one of the most valuable things that I learned. It really drove home the point to me of how important it was to have specific, carefully thought out learning objectives. The third point was to use many different measures and many different kinds of measures. I thought this made a lot of sense. Different students demonstrate their knowledge differently and it is only fair to give all students the opportunity to show what they've learned, not just the students that excel on multiple choice tests, for example. The fourth point, to help the students learn how to do the assessment task, and the fifth step, to engage and encourage students, both are probably so simple that they often get overlooked. The sixth in the list was to interpret assessment results appropriately. Suskie clearly does not believe in grading on a set scale, that is only giving "A's" to 10% of the class. I also have always thought that was pointless; if the student met your learning objectives they should be assessed as such. The seventh and last point was to evaluate the outcomes of your assessments, that is, if the students didn't do well on an examination, consider that perhaps the test was unclear or you did a poor job teaching the concept. I think this is very important; while sometimes many of the student may simply have failed to put in the work necessary to master the material, it is possible that the fault may lie with the teacher.
One thing that Suskie discussess is the possibility in the future of having individually custom-tailored assessments for each student. This seems to me to be inherently unfair; if students are all assessed differently how can their grades be comparable? I agree with the concept given in step three of using many different measures, but I think that assessment can only be relevant in the sense of a grade meaning something if all students are assessed in the same way.