Designing assessment
Resources
- Reviewing assessment design- In a nutshell - 5 minute overview (opens in a new window)
- Additional resources
Overview
When designing assessment consideration needs to be given to tasks which:
- promote engagement with learning,
- are within reasonable academic workload parameters,
- are reliable, valid and equitable, and
- are clearly communicated to students.
Prof Sally Brown argues that assessment design needs to be fit for purpose.
Well designed assessment can promote deep learning through structuring the way students engage with the content of the course (Gibbs, 1992). This can be done through:
- involving students in the assessment design
- integrating assessment into the learning process
- setting assignments which reward understanding and penalise reproduction
- providing explicit marking criteria
- designing assignments which involve interaction among students
- focusing on ‘real world’ or authentic situations in assessment
- promoting interdisciplinary assessment tasks
Student workloads in the design of assessment
At the University of South Australia, specific requirements relating to workload have been stated in the Code of Good Practice: Principles of Student Assessment
Unless a specified case is made for variation, the following guidelines have been established for text-based assessment. In programs where the assessment is of a different kind, the requirements should be equivalent in principle.
- no more than 3 assessment points in any 4.5 unit course
- one assessment point worth no more than 15% in the first third of the study period
- a 4.5 unit course equates to no more than 4,500 words of assessed writing
- due dates need to be coordinated over core courses
- if participation is assessed, criteria on which this is based should be clear and the assessment rating should be no more than 10%
Validity
When writing and designing assessment, consideration needs to be given to validity, or the extent to which an assessment measures what it aims to measure. It is useful to approach thinking about assessment in the following way and ensuring that there is alignment between these elements.
Writing the assessment activity
One of the major issues in assessment is how the requirements are communicated to the students concerned. The requirements of assessment tasks need to be written clearly to reflect the intention of the task. This should include being explicit about the criteria and how the work will be judged. It is always useful to ask someone else to read the assessment task to ensure your intentions are clear.