On Monday 17th February, TeaLab met to discuss alternative forms of assessment.
I facilitated a discussion on how effective different forms of assessment are, focusing on written essay exams and peer review.
We were fortunate enough for this session to be joined by three visiting academics from the University of South Africa in Pretoria who are interested in alternative forms of assessment.
I started off by describing a quick history of the written examination, from its probable origins in Ancient China, up to the origin of the more modern written examination style in 18th Century Cambridge
We then continued with a discussion about the value of written examinations. Below is the prezi on which the discussion was based.
We discussed what we want from assessments. Two main points were raised:
- We want to be able to produce graduates who can be useful after they finish university
- We want to be able to trust those we are assessing
Questions raised were:
- Is assessment for the student or for those looking at results?
- Is assessment for learning or to gain credentialisation?
We then explored whether exams can achieve these needs. Some of the points mentioned were:
- Exams show that you can take pressure
- They allow you to examine a large amount of people efficiently
- They allow us to reassure ourselves that we are doing a good job
- People take exams because we don’t trust those who we are assessing
- One of the SAs mentioned that they run a module with 22000 people; an impossible amount of exams to assess
- Exams are a way of categorising in large quantities
- They’re efficient
After this, we discussed my personal history with written examinations, and explored the reasons why I chose to do a degree that was almost exclusively assessed via coursework
We then explored the value of using Peer Review. Some of the points mentioned were that:
- There have been focus groups talking about how higher performing students were more likely to be willing to do peer review
- In a coursework assessing code – either it worked or it didn’t, so peer review was useful
- Peer review is everywhere in real world
- Peer review is used to understand the criteria and how to mark it
- You don’t need to be a specialist (comparison made to judicial system and jury)
- Peer review should be extensively used in formative stage of assessment
- Peers cant always pick up glaring mistakes in formative assessment
- Peer review online is very difficult
- There is more respect for peers online because its more anonymous
- You are less likely to (sub)consciously judge the person when peer reviewing if it is online and anonymous
To finish off the session, we discussed some creative assessment techniques that I experienced during my time as a student here, as well as exploring the values of other forms of assessment.
Everyone in attendance found it useful that it was presented by a recent graduate of the university, as well as that almost everyone in attendance came from a different subject background and so had different experiences of assessment during their Higher Education studies.