Outputs from London assessment workshop

Challenges

Points which were commonly cited or identified as key challenges are in bold

Workload and time pressures

• Time consuming to provide good quality feedback

• Hard to provide feedback in a timely fashion

• Volume of assessment-related work

• ‘Burden’ of formative assessment

• ‘Burden’ of methods other than essay

Designing appropriate assessments

• Lack of knowledge about theoretical approaches

• Involving students in designing assessment

• Assessing practical skills

• Practice assessment

• Self-assessment

• Validity of methods other than essay

• Lack of formative assessment

• Integration of assessment and learning

• Comprehensibility of assessment criteria

Cultural issues

• Resistance from teachers to embracing change

• Getting staff to be creative in relation to forms of assessment they offer students

• Academic-technical divide

• Team work and academic snobbery on own opinions

• Getting the university to accept new forms of assessment

• Public and professional perception

• Student perception

• Reliance on grades for both students and tutors

• Getting students to accept new forms of assessment

• Fragmented innovation – best practice (and less successful experience) not always being shared (although we’re trying!)

• Staff training and motivation

• “Once/twice a week” learning

• Literal approach of students

Implementation of technology

• Software constantly changes - so you deliver but the technology has moved on

• Getting the best out of technology

• Compartmentalisation of technology

• Developing online assessment tutorials

• View that the exploitation of technology will make everything easy – reluctance to consider actual workflow/processes/costs (eg online submission – who prints the student work / how does marking take place?)

• Organic nature of open source doesn’t help rigour of standardised assessment metrics

• Turnitin in student self-assessment

• Feedback using voice recording systems

• Getting academics to countenance marking online with Turnitin

• Timescales for new innovation and development

Administrative issues

• Academic handwriting

• No link between online submission and student records

• Large files

• Reducing the administration overhead relating to the management of paper based assessments

• Keeping individual profiles of student strengths/weaknesses (targeting)

Programme- and institution-level assessment issues

• Over-assessment

• Business change requirements

• Consistency across a course

• Applying rubric of grading across institution consistently