Much of the literature on assessment in higher education over the last few decades has focused on three broad strands. The first strand is a quality assurance strand that focuses on questions such as the reliability and validity of assessments, assessment standards and summative assessment. The second strand has focused on assessment design, the types of assessment used and how they impact learning. In this area there has been a shift to diversify assessment types and embrace authentic, work-relevant assessments. The third strand has focused on student assessment literacy and, latterly, feedback literacy. This relates to how students understand assessment standards and assessment types to learn and progress their learning. These last two strands have shifted the debate towards formative assessment and the interaction between formative and summative assessment.
The first and second strands have resulted in assessment regimes that are extremely complex. Students have to somehow integrate and consider learning outcomes, assessment briefs, multiple assessment types and assessment criteria / rubrics when producing their work. Then once the work has been graded students need to understand the grade, understand their feedback and deal with the emotional impact of assessment and their own expectations and motivations. The recognition of this has resulted in the third strand on assessment and feedback literacy. Assessment and feedback literacy is a necessary requirement in order to help students grapple with the complexities of assessment regimes.
All of these strands have emphasised the need for transparency in assessment processes so that students can understand them and demonstrate their learning. However, the complexity of the learning we expect in higher education can often be hard to make explicit and transparent. All too often implicit criteria are used to make judgments and grade students that are not specified in the learning outcomes, briefs or assessment criteria (Bloxham, Boyd & Orr 2011). Students and staff often expect some ‘reward’ in the grading process for effort or for progress made during a unit of learning (Brookhart et al 2016). Effort is rarely ever specified as an explicit criteria and tends to go against the purpose of learning outcomes designed to focus on what students can do not on how much time and effort they put in. Expression is often another implicit criteria. In written work students can be ‘punished’ for poor writing style or grammar even when neither of these aspects are explicit criteria. In art and design, if the student’s aesthetic or approach does not resonate with the marker this can result in lower grades even when the explicit learning outcomes and criteria have been met.
It seems that the complexity of assessment regimes are increasing. As we try to be more transparent assessment briefs get longer, rubrics become more prominent and it can be hard to resist the proliferation of learning outcomes without writing them in such a way as they become meaningless, empty statements. (As an aside, I was once asked to convert 5 learning outcomes into 2 for each unit I taught. As you can imagine there was only two ways to do this: very long outcomes with multiple clauses or shorter, generic outcomes largely devoid of meaning. Neither of which approach was for the benefit of the students.)
One solution that seems to be often overlooked is pass / fail or even ungrading. I will focus on pass / fail here as an easier first step from the dominant letter or numerical grading. I think that pass / fail as opposed to a letter or numerical graded system reduces the complexity of the assessment regime and should allow students to focus more on their learning and work. Firstly, pass / fail removes the need for complex assessment criteria / rubrics and the need to help students understand what they mean. Instead students can focus on meeting the learning outcomes. Secondly, pass / fail removes the letter or numerical grade. This should free up academics from having to spend time deciding and justifying fine-grained grading decisions and give them more time to focus on feedback. It could also help students deal with the emotionally impacts of grading, which can often be a cause of stress and anxiety. Thirdly, pass / fail should reduce or better mitigate the use of implicit criteria. With more focus on whether the learning outcome has been met, fine grained judgments about expression or subjective judgments about effort should be reduced.
By increasing the use of pass / fail and reducing the amount of letter or numerical grading there is a chance that we reduce assessment complexity, better support student learning whilst still being able to maintain authentic assessments and the rigour and validity of the assessment regime.
References:
- Bloxham , S., Boyd, P. & Orr, S. (2011) Mark my words: the role of assessment criteria in UK higher education grading practices, Studies in Higher Education, 36(6), 655-670.
- Brookhart, S.M. et al (2016) A Century of Grading Research: Meaning and Value in the Most Common Educational Measure, Review of Educational Research, 86(4), 803-848.
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