The future of assessment

We do like post-its

What is the future of assessment?

For an assessment nerd it was a treat to join like-minded colleagues at a day organised by Jisc on “The future of assessment”. We were encouraged to imagine a wide variety of scenarios and the challenges associated with them, and of course the solutions we might need to prepare for these futures. The initials AI were discouraged, whether it was artificial intelligence or academic integrity.

I don’t expect the basic criteria for assessment to change in the next 10 years, which are that assessment needs to be:

• Valid: Does it let students demonstrate achievement of the learning outcomes?
• Secure: Am I sure the students(s) did the work themselves (and what do I mean by themselves)?
• Fair: Do all students have equal opportunity to demonstrate their achievements?
• Manageable: Will it be straightforward to mark, give feedback, and moderate?
• Clear: Will students understand what to do and see how this task fits into their course overall?
• Satisfaction: Will I look forward to marking it?

But how should we think about the approaches and methods that we use? We worked in quite small groups on individual scenarios, and while there is always a possibility of groupthink at these occasions, I was struck by how many of the imagined futures and solutions came down to the need for assessment to contain these elements:

1. More explicit focus on process rather than product
2. More explicit focus on competence and the application of knowledge, moving away from recall testing and offering the options to test breadth and depth of competence.
3. Use of portfolios to show competence achievements, allowing for some big changes in the future:
   • Move to pass/fail, no longer trying to explain the difference between 55% and 58%
     • Giving students choices in the ways they demonstrate achievement of competence
       • Giving students the opportunity to repeat assessments without penalty until they can show competence

templateWhat if we only assessed skills and application of knowledge

We noted that these features are already present in vocational education and that we should be able to apply them in more traditional academic subjects, using graduate competence frameworks. Competences do not have to be fragmented and simple, they can be complex: critical analysis, evaluation of evidence, design of studies, interpersonal communications, structuring presentations, communicating complex ideas to different audiences. Here are some examples from Middlesex University in the UK, but there are many others. We can think about competences without getting into a stale argument about neoliberalism and the purposes of university education: they will of course be contextualised to the relevant subject area.

Feel free to challenge these – the point of imagining future scenarios is to discuss the implications and plan strategically rather than stumbling on as we have done before and arriving accidentally in a future we don’t like.