Examination basics review

Note: This section is adapted from a blog post Links to an external site. I wrote in June 2023. The words ‘assessment’ and ‘examination’ are used interchangeably.

Some basic points

Not all learning leads to qualifications, but most of the teaching that happens in a university is aimed at least loosely towards judging whether students have achieved certain academic standards. These standards are socially constructed (Bloxham, den-Outer, Hudson, & Price, 2015) rather than some absolute set of facts, but they are still accepted as a measure of student achievement. In this context, assessment security is essential: we need to know that this student has achieved these agreed standards if we are going to hand out the credentials. Validity is also a requirement: the assessment has to test the intended learning outcomes. Many courses also aim for authenticity – to make the assessment more like something students might do in the future. And assessment should be fair: every student should have an equal opportunity to succeed in the examination.

There is perfectly good theoretical underpinning for this, if you care to spend time with observational theories. Vygotsky’s theory of proximal development, for instance, puts the teacher in the role of someone facilitating student movement from one zone of knowledge and capability to another (Vygotsky, 1978). Any good constructivist will want to see their students take the building blocks provided and use them to create something new (Clark, 1998). If you accept this, final examinations should allow students to build on what they have learned about the discipline and make judgements about novel problems. Students should have to think hard, draw on a wide range of sources, and make decisions which are similar to those which a professional in the field would make. We then give them credentials to move on to another stage of practice.

To fully achieve this, assessments do need to be authentic. They should be carried out in conditions which are similar to those which might be experienced in practice, with access to resources, and time to think where that is relevant. Very few professions require students to make repeated and replicable decisions sitting at a table in a room surrounded by other students, in an arbitrary timescale designed to make the assessment manageable. There are some exceptions, of course. We want doctors, lawyers and accountants to give us a quick decision (though they do have access to resources, they need to be quick at looking things up), but we are usually prepared to let them go away and think about it, or ask a peer. But in most cases, at the end of an undergraduate or masters’ programme we want to test the ability to deal with complex ideas, find and interpret a wide range of data and synthesise them into a useful output, and we could give people plenty of time to do this. So there has been a gradual move to assessment tasks which test these outcomes.

Summary: examination and assessment tasks need to be valid, secure and fair. There are also situations where it is useful for them to be authentic. Consider how you know that your examination tasks are aligned to the learning outcomes, how you know that the students are doing the work themselves, and how you know they have equal opportunity to complete the task successfully. 

 

Note: This Canvas resource does not cover assessment and examination principles in detail, but if you want to learn more about them, you can consult with AHU colleagues or even read my book (sorry for the self-promotion! Forsyth, R. (2022). Confident assessment in higher education. Links to an external site. Sage.)