Introduction
Much has been written about assessment, perhaps more than other topic concerned with learning and teaching in higher education. Assessment we are led to believe is the principal motivator for students, if an element of a programme is not assessed, goes the logic of this argument, then students will not invest time and effort in it. However, at the same time, whenever examples of good learning and teaching practice are identified, it seems that students are willing to work on elements which are not directly assessed. The lesson therefore would appear to be that excellent teaching practices encourage quality learning in students, learning that does not stay strictly within limits, but takes on the character of personal development.
Planning assessments
It is not uncommon for a number of assessment tasks to fall at roughly the same time, towards the end of a module or course of study. It is important therefore for you to find out when assignments are due in order to work back from the hand in deadline in order to leave enough time for preparation. As the scenario suggests, and as research evidence makes plain, leaving assignments until the last possible moment is a tactic that can work in the short-term, but it is unlikely to work in the long-term and most tutors become adept at spotting rushed, last minute assignments. Only exceptionally do such assignments manage to address the task satisfactorily enough to command high grades.
Scheduling is also important in those cases where coursework is completed over a period of time. Again, an incremental approach in which the work is completed over time works to the favour of the student, whereas that which is assembled at the last moment will often betray its preparation by being superficial and downright shoddy.
Clarifying expectations
The Strategic Learner makes sure they know what is expected of them; what the purpose of the assignment is, what knowledge is being tested and how best that knowledge might be represented.
Students are surrounded by sources of support and advice, from trusted friends and colleagues, from tutors and from those documents which outline the programmes of study with which they are engaged. In military terms intelligence gathered is said to be crucial to the outcome of subsequent battles; it is a somewhat crude analogy, but the same holds true for assessment regimes. In short, the more you know, the better your chances of success are.
Pitfalls and temptations
There is nothing quite so distressing as a tutor marking a piece of work from a student to realise that the student has misread, or misinterpreted, or plainly not read carefully enough the task that the assignment requires them to complete. At the same time it is also a tragedy for the student who has invested so much time and effort in completing that assignment. The moral of this story then is to check, check and check again.
Pushed for time, not having a complete set of notes and not having attended some of the taught sessions there is a temptation to rely on a website to provide the solution to your problems. Beware, whilst there are many excellent sources of information on the internet, there are also some highly dubious ones. The same rigour of selection in relation to sources of evidence has to be exercised with Google and Wiki sources as one would use with hardcopy, textual sources; supporting your argument by reference to an article in the Daily Mail would not have the credibility of reference to research published in a dedicated journal within the appropriate subject area.
And finally, there is a temptation when pushed for time, to throw everything you’ve got at the assignment, in short, to confuse quantity with quality. What you have to bear in mind is that the person marking your work is probably reading and marking anything between 20 and 200 plus pieces of work, do you really think that they won’t spot when a student is loading an assignment with excess and superfluous baggage?
