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Assessment ~ what for?

What is the purpose of the University Teaching and Research Centre?

Our main purpose is to help academic staff improve the courses which they are offering here at Victoria. At the moment we are spending a lot of time helping staff evaluate courses, we run our own informal courses in tertiary education, we run discussion groups for staff, and we have a continual preparation for in-service courses, which are usually run during the vacation period. We also have quite a commitment outside the university in talking to others about our work here.

How many of the staff make use of the Centre?

The response we have is so great that we are turning work away. There are a number of staff who are very concerned about teaching and examining. However, in terms of a percentage of the total staff, the response is fairly low. The courses we run on small and large group teaching we restrict to about 12 people at a time. These are mainly for the new staff and are always full. We're starting soon to provide courses for the more experienced staff.

One of the main areas which you would be asked to give advice on would be assessment. What do you see as the purposes of assessment?

The overall assessment is towards a qualification a piece of paper - while within a course assessment is more orientated towards a person's progress or attainment in that particular course. However, one can't get away from the fact that this contributes towards the final piece of paper, which some get and others don't.

The majority of staff see assessment as a motivating force for students to undertake work or work harder on specific projects. This comes through a lot in what students say - that they tend to work better, more conscientiously, if they know it's an assessable piece of work. The danger here is that students tend to disregard work which is not assessed, and that staff start to weight everything as contributing towards final assessment, which means that the students don't have the opportunity to make errors (where making errors is part of the learning process) because this will have an effect on their final grades, and consequently only select those things that they can do, rather than those [unclear: dtmes] that they think they would get most out of doing.

Do you think there is a difference between how staff see assessment and how students see it?

I think there is inevitably a difference. If you put it on a continuum from radical to conservative, you would have more students on the radical end (i.e. abolition of assessment) and more staff on the conservative end. In the middle you'd probably have a great bulk of students and staff together. Taking a look at the interests of students and staff you would expect a situation like that to occur.

I think any assessment situation, and indeed any teaching situation as we see it puts the lecturer or tutor in a situation where s/he has knowledge which s/he must implant into the ignorant student. The moment you mention the word "teacher" s/he is looked to as the person with the knowledge and the information. It's also true that a number of students falsely see it in this way and get very upset if the teacher acts in any other role. If teachers sit back and say "you can learn yourselves" they often get criticised by students for not doing their jobs. They are meant to be up the front telling students what is right or wrong, true or false.

Do you think students and staff should have as much choice as possible in deciding on methods of assessment for specific courses?

I think students and staff should have a choice. I think at some stage the institution has to set boundaries on how far this choice is to extend. If staff and students decide that there will be no assessment for a particular course then this starts to become an institutional concern because the course is one of the factors which add up to the piece of paper the institution will eventually give out. And so other staff members become involved. We've got to look at the consequences of what we do in one course. This is not to say that we should be restricted. It's a matter of being realistic and seeing that you are not working in isolation from other courses in the programme that students are taking.

There are actually numerous choices open to staff and students when they get together to decide on a course assessment technique. There are basically two types of assessment - in-term final assessment and end of term final assessment. End-of-term final assessment is classically a closed book exam, but there is nothing to say it cannot be an open book exam, a pre-published form of examination or a resubmitted essay from earlier in the course. The variety is tremendous. We've got some courses in the university based on the Keller programme (a series of short mastery-type tests). The variety is available, it's simply a matter of people not knowing what exists.

Do you see any value in the classical closed book examination as a method of assessment?

It is a form of assessment which is very common throughout the university and frankly its value has been overestimated. I make a distinction here between the holding of a final examination of some sort and the classical three-hour closed book examination - its the latter which is highly overrated. It's often misused and there's evidence to suggest that most of it is simply a memory test. The idea that it measures understanding, creativity and insight has not really been proved. The use of final examinations can have a role to play. An open book examination can play a very important role at the end of a course to measure the person's ability to use the references etc. The essay which is resubmitted at the end of the course is another valuable assessment method, particularly in advanced courses. You would write a paper or essay, the class would discuss it, and then you could take it away and rehash it in the the light of what has been said. This is what happens when staff submit papers - they send them off to referees, comments come back, and they are usually rehashed before they're sent off again.

At present in this university there is a good deal of debate about assessment methods, of courses, and particular teaching practices. Do you see any reason for this increased activity?

I'd agree that there seems to be more debate on these aspects since I arrived here three years ago. I'd like to think that it's been growing and maybe the starting point was the student recommendation for the consideration of workload problems in 1973, which made students en masse more aware of what was happening around the place. The faculties have also played their part and I believe they were honest in their concern to find solutions - and this has led students to believe that they can be heard in these matters. It's also made staff more aware, and so you'll find more of them ready to discuss assessment with students. So, it's not a sudden occurence, but rather an encouraging trend that has been devloping over a period of time.