I am a big believer in getting assessment right. A student's record, pass rate, GPA, and their future success depend on the vital ability to be given a true evaluation of their skills and understanding. Here is a quick and dirty look at some issues that happen:
- Outcome if assessment is too lenient: Student has an unrealisitic expectation of success after graduation. Employers are dissappointed, not only in the student, but in the school.
- Outcome if assessment is too difficult: Student is held to a standard that is beyond the intentions of the objectives, being measured on skills/knowledge not in the course. This results in a high failure rate and often, a student's unwillingness to continue.
- Outcome when the assessments don't match the objectives: Students study the wrong information and maybe even know quite a bit, but fail because the tests were designed for something else.
- Outcome when tests are not vetted: Imagine a scenario when an automated test has bad answers. It grades a student who knows the correct answer and marks then down or fails them anyway. Timid students don't challenge it. They just take the bad grade, all because a teacher did not bother to fix the stuff to begin with. Alternatively, if students were already at risk, this just makes it worse.
As an administrator, I have never witnessed students more upset than when given a bad grade because of a bad assessment.
Evaluating students is essential to the learning outcomes of the students. Utilizing the rubric and the different levels of Bloom's taxonomy is great help in constructing evaluation of students.
I feel that evaluating students in clinical areas might be a challengoing for me. The rubric is definitely a great tool to help with defining expectation/grading of clinical learnin.
