Are traditional assessment methods appropriate in contemporary higher education? Jun. 2014

One of the consequences of a surface approach that involves memorising rather than embedding the knowledge into your minds means that very soon after the exam all the knowledge you had is often lost or often disregarded to make room for the next module. This is in part a criticism of modular based degrees where often modules are delivered in isolation which creates artiﬁcial boundaries between concepts and areas of study. As a result exams can cause students to think too narrowly and restrict their ability to make connections across subject areas. Students fail to focus on the wider ﬁeld of study which would enable them to draw on learning from previous modules which in turn would strengthen and support their performance in the current one. Advocates of Authentic assessment such as Wiggins would argue that “traditional tests tend to reveal only whether the student can recognise, recall or “plug in” what was learned out of context” (1990:1). have identiﬁed that non traditional assessments can take less time to mark particularly when using group based activities (Willmott 2014). In addition more alternative forms of innovative and authentic assessment might provide more opportunities for inclusion where there are elements of choice involved. Yet exams are not all bad and there are genuine arguments for the use of exam based assessments and the concept of what is an examination has broadened. Exams were traditionally a series of questions in a timed written test often a three hour unseen paper with three or more essay questions. Examinations now have several forms (Brown 1999) such as • Open-book exams • Take-away papers Agazzi (1967) summarises some of the key criticisms aimed at exams and despite the time that has elapsed from his writing, many of the criticisms below still remain applicable today • Case Studies • Objective structured clinical examinations • Examinations are essentially a matter of chance and good luck and their results depend almost entirely on the character and mood of the examiners • Simulations • In-tray exercises The marking of written papers is affected by the legibility or otherwise of the candidate’s handwriting • MCQ or short answer tests • • The ﬁnal result is inﬂuenced by the examiners own cultural and ideological opinions. • The candidate’s own state of health, whether he approaches the examination calmly or in a state of nervous tension, even his social background, have a decisive inﬂuence on his answers and on the results • Experiment has shown that there can be a marked and disconcerting discrepancy in the marks awarded by different examiners correcting the same papers • Examiners’ own reactions can override the objective evidence offered by the candidate’s answers. Since the time of Agazzi’s writing there has been a massiﬁcation of higher education which has inevitably led to larger cohort sizes and a need for assessment methods that suit large numbers of students. In the UK there has also been an increase in international students, many of which are more familiar with traditional examinations than more innovative authentic assessments. Exams may therefore seem an obvious choice for assessing a large group of diverse students in a reasonable time frame. Here the priority is time and resource rather than authenticity. However, recent innovations in authentic assessment A BPP Business School working paper The argument against exams is their inability to represent or reﬂect the complexity of situations and skills. The research cited above implies it’s impossible to test anything beyond knowledge and comprehension in an exam. This means exams should be reserved for the testing of Bloom et als (1956) lower level skills only. However exams and the technology used to deliver them have signiﬁcantly advanced and online MCQs such as the QuestionMark e-assessment tool offer a sophisticated range of questions that some would argue can be adopted to test the full range of cognitive skills from knowledge through to synthesis (Bull and McKenna 2004). assessment have identiﬁed that non traditional assessments can take less time to mark particularly when using group based activities (Willmott 2014). In addition more alternative forms of innovative and authentic assessment might provide more opportunities for inclusion where there are elements of choice involved. Whilst there are those that would still argue MCQs cannot in reality, sufficiently test these higher level skills (Fellenz 2010), viewing authentic assessment as merely assessing higher level skills is still missing the second concept of authenticity which is about reﬂecting real world tasks. Here again a tool such as QuestionMark could be used for medical students to diagnose a condition or for business students to determine the biggest risk to an organisation. bpp.com

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