Jacqueline Goulbourne

While the move towards authentic assessment is positive, it can be hard to maintain the perception by students that the kind of subjective assessment decisions necessary for these is valid. Often, these subjective decisions made by tutors can be a source of intense disappointment for students when their grades don’t match their efforts or expectations. In turn tutors find these assessments stressful and can undermine their sense of professional judgement. In my former role as Assessment Team Leader, marking data showed significant differences between tutors in awarding marks and also a drift in leniency or severity over the marking period.

​

Formative, process-based feedback, vital in developing skills competency, is very focused on the building trust and confidence in the classroom, as well as the personal gains developed by the student. It is subjective and often tailored to the learner and because of this, there is less of a power differential than is apparent in lots of assessment activities. Conversely, summative, competence-based assessment criteria in performance-based exams are not relational and often developed using qualitative, subjective language such as ‘good’ and ‘excellent’ and so do not align well with binary skills-based ‘can do’ learning objectives.

Within this environment, it can be difficult for students to develop a true picture of their abilities.

​

This talk will describe some of the issues I encountered when running Presentation exams for 2000+ language learners, and how my team mitigated some of these issues through a combination of staff standardisation training, student assessment literacy training, and looking at intra- and inter-staff reliability through utilising Multi Facet Rasch Measurement visualisations to develop a picture of what is really happening with your exams.