Recommended assessment formats for the Summer 2020 assessment period

1. Coursework assessment

In this context, coursework assessment refers to any method of assessment that is not a timed take-home assessment. 

For the Summer Term 2020 assessment period the School recommends one of the following:

• Essays (or similar writing tasks including policy papers, research proposals, case studies, mini research projects, annotated bibliographies), with questions/instructions released on a date to be determined by the department, but within ST1 or ST2; and open for a period of three days, one week, two weeks and three weeks.

• Oral assessments by either video conferencing or telephone, which should be no more than 20 minute interviews and recorded for moderation and external examiner review.

Advantages of coursework assessment

• Moving from exam-style questions to a single task allows for different kinds of cognitive work including extended arguments, analysis and synthesis of concepts, theories and empirical data across a course.

• In an essay or similar task, students can also make more extensive and accurate use of sources. 

Disadvantages of coursework assessment

• The introduction of a significantly different assessment format may be disconcerting for students, particularly given the little contact time that may be available to discuss with changed approaches with their course teachers.

• While clear and positive communication about expectations and policies should help, note that students may have a range of different concerns (e.g. fairness, validity, reliability, accessibility).

• The longer timeframes allowed for essay-based tasks may provide greater opportunity for students to work collaboratively or to source their answers from outside agencies.

• The lack of campus-based staff to support technical issues and the spread of our students across the globe makes management of either long-term projects or technically demanding sessions (e.g. videoconferencing) increasingly challenging. 

Administering coursework assessment

As this format is a further change from the exam, expectations should be made as clear as possible to students including:

• How the new assessment aligns to the learning outcomes and assessment aims of the course,

• The required breadth and depth of coverage of course material in answers,

• Expected word length and structure if this is a significant change from original assessment,

• Any adjustments planned for the marking process including revised marking criteria.

2. Timed take-home assessment

A take-home assessment is an assessment based on the planned closed-book exam, but questions are sent out to students to complete at home, who are then required to submit their answers digitally within 24 hours. 

The 24-hour duration should be sufficient to accommodate time zones across the globe and most IPs and IEAs that students will be working under, while discouraging, or impeding, students’ abilities to source answers from others.

Take-home assessments are discussed in more detail in the Assessment Toolkit here.

Advantages of retaining the original exam questions for 24-hour assessment

• Basing take-home assessment questions on planned exams questions (rather than constructing a completely new assessment) will ensure that they test appropriate student learning outcomes on the course.

• Questions have been devised to assess a suitable level of depth and breadth of knowledge.

• The papers will retain a familiar format that can allay student concerns. Students will most likely have been prepared for this final assessment through formative work during the academic year.

• Students will be revising/will have revised from past papers and may be confused by expectations in reframed questions.

Advantages of modifying exam questions for 24-hour take-home exam assessment

• You can set more ambitious questions, using higher order cognitive skills (argument, application, comparison, critique, synthesis, etc.). In some cases, this may simply be achieved through the addition of condition or riders to the questions.

• You can add more reflective elements to questions (e.g. asking students to identify what parts of a question they found difficult and why). Note that ‘personalising’ the assessment may help to address student collusion and misconduct concerns.

• Differentiation of questions can allow for students to receive randomised tests, which can mitigate, to some extent, the possibility of student collusion. 

• As an ‘open book’ assessment, questions can ask students to engage more accurately and deeply with external sources. (Although students will have had limited access for the preceding months to physical libraries, printing facilities and, for some, online resources). Alternatively, the questions can remain unchanged and these additional capabilities being assessed recognised in adjusted marking expectations.

Administering take-home exam assessments

Written instructions should be carefully prepared to minimise student stress and queries during the assessment period. These should include:

• Expectations for student behaviour (e.g. balancing time between preparation/planning, writing answers and reviewing written work; how course materials are expected/allowed to be used; explicit statements on colluding with students and general academic conduct).

• The policy for late submissions and academic misconduct.

• An explicit indication of answer formats; e.g.:

• Clear instructions for additional submission requirements. For example, take-home exams for quantitative subjects may require students to ‘scan’ their scripts for submission: instructions would then explicitly state required formats and resolutions, and perhaps suggest appropriate applications (e.g. Microsoft Office Lens), as well as procedures in case students do not expect to have access to such tools.

• For guidance on running a timed assessment within a 24-hour window, please see the Eden centre instructions here. 

Recommendations on word limits

 Coursework assessment 

When making choices about word limits for coursework assessment, the Summer 2020 assessment period we recommend that these are calculated based on the consideration of the following factors:

·       The skills and knowledge that are being assessed through this particular piece of assessment

·       The level of the students (1^st, 2^nd, 3^rd or PGT)

·       The weighting of the assessment in relation to other assessments on the course

·       The overall word count / assessment load for the course as a whole, including formative coursework

For your information the most common length of summative coursework assessments at the School are:

·       1,500 (particularly at UG level)

·       2,000 (at both UG and PGT levels)

·       3,000 (at both UG and PGT levels)

·       4,000 level (at both UG and PGT levels)

Take-home assessment  

The School recommends that the word limit for each question in an essay-style take-home assessment is between 1,000 and 1,200 words where students would usually be required to answer 2 or 3 questions. Thus, for a 2-hour exam with 2 questions, students would have an overall word limit of between 2000-2400 words.

Word count will be shorter in the case of short answer questions. Signalling the length of the assessment task will give a clear steer to the students of what is expected (together with an indication of the learning outcomes that are being tested) and discourage them from spending every moment in the 24-hour download period working on the assessment paper.

Finally, specifying an upper word limit can help keep marking workloads manageable.

For further guidance on what may be appropriate for your course, please contact your Eden Centre departmental adviser.