Staff Information & Teaching Guide - Swinburne University of ...

APPENDIX 6: ESSAY
Assessment within institutional, departmental and unit of study systems - an
examination of assessment criteria
Assessment in the higher education system has traditionally been focussed on
determining the degree to which students have achieved the knowledge of a particular
course. Such assessment has typically resulted in the quantification of students’
achievements being used to rank students (Nightingale et al., 1996). These rankings
have frequently been used as professionally- and community-recognised standards, and
have in turn been used by prospective employers and the community for on-going
assessment of the individual’s worth and expertise. However, such traditional forms of
assessment are gradually changing as a consequence of education reforms and
changes associated with the increasing need for a broader role in university education.
Universities are now under considerable pressure to ensure that courses facilitate the
development of a range of specific and generic abilities or graduate attributes which can
be demonstrated at the completion of the higher education process. It is not sufficient for
universities to simply list attributes that they see as desirable (in both specialist and
generic skills). It is therefore necessary for the universities to be able to demonstrate the
degree to which individual students have developed or achieved such attributes, and this
in turn has required universities to encourage and promote the development of
assessment strategies which can better reflect the learning process at both the specific
academic and generic skill level.
Assessment has been defined as the measuring of learner achievement in activities
associated with an instructional (academic) program (Percival & Ellington, 1984).
Traditionally, particular assessment styles have been associated with particular
academic fields – such as greater emphasis on the use of essays in the humanities and
greater emphasis on examination results in the scientific fields (Brown & Knight, 1994),
but there has been little evidence of consideration of the need to link the method of
assessment and the quality of assessment.
It is now recognised that assessment can be designed to assess generic skills
associated with the academic unit of study area as well as assessing academic progress
throughout the unit of study and/or course. This assessment is best achieved using a
range of assessment techniques which are designed to provide information about the
student’s ability in a specific academic task, and the progress in the student’s
development of more generic skills. Such use of multiple methods of assessment will
provide the opportunity to assess multiple talents of the students, suitable for the
requirements and interest of multiple audiences (Brown & Knight, 1994).
Assessment procedures need to be investigated to determine the degree to which they
are valid (ie relevant to the curriculum content), reliable (producing reproducible results
within different groups of similar student cohorts), practical and cost-effective (in terms of
staff time, ease of application, and administration and development costs), fair (reflecting
the range of expected behaviours or skills and not advantaging one student over
another), and useful – particularly with respect to feedback which can benefit the student
in the learning process. It is important to also keep these criteria in mind when
considering the relative merits of different assessment techniques to be adopted as
multiple assessment procedures for determining a range of specific and generic skills
and knowledge. Different assessment techniques can include the use of formative and
summative assessment, the adoption of assessment benchmarking (norm- versus
criterion- referenced assessment), and the effectiveness and potential for feedback to
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