Student Assessment in Higher Education

A Handbook for Assessing Performance

Kevin Cox, Bradford Imrie, Allen Miller

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781135370657
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Pedagogía
• Subtopic: Educación general

This text provides higher education teachers with an overview of the many approaches to setting, marking and reviewing coursework, assignments, tests and examinations used in programmes for certificates, diplomas, first degrees or higher degrees. It discusses the influence of each on students.

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The place of assessment in higher education

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Purposes of higher education

Education is what survives when what has been learned has been forgotten.

(BF Skinner)

The advantage of a classical education is that it enables you to despise the wealth that it prevents you from achieving.

(Russell Green)

Introduction

Students undertake education at the tertiary level for many reasons, not all of which would be regarded as important by faculty. For example, if students enrol in higher education to find a mate or to play in a college football team, the appropriate measure of success is obviously not a set of formal examinations! This chapter looks at changing expectations of higher education over the last two or three decades, acknowledging that a university or college degree may serve widely differing purposes.

We do not question the view that for many students, in different countries and different types of institutions, the key purposes of higher education are achieved. On the other hand, there is no doubt that recent changes in demographic patterns, occupational requirements, student motivation and institutional structure have created difficulties for university students, teachers and administrators.

In the United Kingdom, the National Committee of Inquiry into Higher Education chaired by Sir Ron Dearing (1997) stated in Section 5.11 of its report that the four main purposes of higher education are:

1. to inspire and enable individuals to develop their capabilities to the highest potential levels throughout life, so that they grow intellectually, are well equipped for work, can contribute effectively to society and achieve personal fulfilment

2. to increase knowledge and understanding for their own sake and to foster their application to the benefit of the economy and society

3. to serve the needs of an adaptable, sustainable, knowledge-based economy at local, regional and national levels

4. to play a major role in shaping a democratic, civilised, inclusive society.

The situation in the United States, with its great variety of universities and colleges catering for students of widely different educational and cultural levels, is much more complex than in those countries where there is a smaller choice for higher education. Erwin (1995), writing from the James Madison University in Virginia, lists three major problems which need to be addressed when an institution is formulating its admission requirements. These are not limited to the United States but could apply to systems of higher education in many countries:

● students do not have the basic skills of reading, writing and mathematics to function effectively in the workforce and in a competitive society.

● there is little consensus about the general education or the knowledge, skills and personal experiences every student should have, regardless of his or her major subject of study.

● credible measures of student learning are generally available, particularly at an institutional level.

Erwin refers to attempts in the United States, in the United Kingdom and the European Union to identify institutions where the above problems exist. Difficulties arise, he claims, when examinations fail to measure ‘higher order models of cognitive and affective development’. We shall discuss these issues in more detail in Chapters 3 to 5 of the present book.

In the same article, Erwin refers to a survey of 37 major corporations and 36 small firms in the United Kingdom conducted by Otter (1992) who identified the following more general learning goals as important for graduation. Graduates should be able to:

access and select information, synthesize and interpret information, demonstrate commitment, demonstrate self discipline, manage personal stress, communicate clearly and accurately, communicate effectively orally, work cooperatively, work alone, accept criticism, understand own strengths and weaknesses, act ethically and possess basic computer skills, (p. 115)

We may well ask ourselves whether the systems of assessment used in our institutions and with our own students are able to verify that students have achieved the above goals by the time they graduate!

Higher education in its social context

Contemporary higher education (HE) does not exist because students want it. HE, as an entity, exists because countries (governments) need it. As noted by Kogan et al. (1994), ‘Governments have come to see higher education more than ever as an aid to the achievement of social and economic goals and increasingly expect it to be responsive to their agendas.’ So the purposes of HE are to meet the needs of government and will be somewhat different according to the country or government. For example, contrast the HE systems of Italy and Germany, or China and India. The models of the twelfth century do not apply to the needs of the twenty-first -history will not repeat itself. Where HE systems are well established, old models still influence contemporary systems but even these are now changing due to pressures from government and from society -as represented by the currently adopted vocabulary of customers, clients and stakeholders; not to mention employers, parents and students.

Consider some reasonably recent suggestions of purposes of HE. Bligh et al. (1981) list three purposes:

1. cultural: to pass on the future, the heritage, or a body of knowledge from one generation to the next

2. functional: to produce the qualified manpower to benefit a future society or as an instrument of national development

3. social: to advance individuals either socially or in terms of their personal development.

The purposes of HE must match the needs of government and of students; the former so that there will be funding, the latter so that there will be sufficient enrolments. In terms of qualified manpower planning (see below), the objectives of HE must also now meet the requirements of professional bodies and, in some countries, legal requirements. Accordingly, for the future development of HE in a context of more and different students; more students studying part-time; more older students (no longer patronized as ‘kids’ by so-called higher education teachers); and more accountability (cost and quality), the above purposes can be modified to:

● cultural: to pass on a body of knowledge from one generation to the next

● functional: to produce the qualified manpower to benefit society as an instrument of national development and to ‘keep up with competitors’

● social: to advance individuals either socially or economically

● perpetuating: to perpetuate the national system of beliefs, values and procedures with some evolution – usually in reaction to government policy.

Some three years later, one of Bligh's co-authors, Warren Piper (1984) offered the following variations of HE purposes:

● functional: the production of the desired combination of trained person-power; professional and social competence

● cultural: fashioning and passing on the culture from one generation to the next; induction of individual into the ranks of the educated

● social service: the facilitation of students' progress to their various chosen ends.

Note the change of purpose description and of vocabulary, eg person-power, professional competence, social service.

For sustainable economic (and social) development, it is vitally important that vocational, diploma-level, education is recognized and appreciated as an important part of higher education. The preference for degree-level education can distort the overall mission of higher education which should include opportunities for matching ability with educational programs, and the provision of education for capability which will match development needs.

In a keynote address to a UK conference on ‘What do employers really want from higher education?’ Harvey (1997) notes: ‘Employers are not a homogenous bunch. But certain themes run through, and there is an overwhelming view that graduates add real value to their business.’ He further comments that the value comes from the higher level academic skills but the problem is that graduates have ‘little idea of the nature and culture of the workplace and find it difficult to adjust’.

In various ways employers are increasingly influencing the HE agenda: expressing dissatisfaction with the graduate as ‘product’; specifying expectations of skills and attitudes; and becoming HE providers themselves because of perceived deficiencies in the normal higher education system.

What then are the purposes of HE? When Roizen and Jepsen (1985) considered employer expectations of higher education, they introduced their discussion with a justification for manpower planning, which had been argued by Fulton et al. (1980):

The first is that higher education makes extremely heavy demands on society's resources and it is inefficient and inequitable to treat it simply as a luxury consumption good for a relatively small number of people. The second is that even in countries where higher education provision is based on social demand, a very high proportion of the students do themselves consider that it has vocational implications for them. Unless appropriate jobs are likely to be available for students their social demand for higher education is itself based on a misapprehension.

Employers, of course, are affected by the assumptions of manpower planning but often, dependent on country, do not have a truly representative voice; this too is changing and employer federations are increasingly publishing reports and making submissions to governments. As noted by Roizen and Jepsen (1985), some employers feel that HE expansion has gone ‘too fast’ but they also see that a country needs ‘to spend money on higher education to keep up with competitors’ – not the same thing.

In a section headed ‘The relationship between work and other experience and higher education provision’ the Dearing (1997) Report on Higher Education in the Learning Society discussed the value of work experience for students in UK universities. The Committee made two recommendations which, if implemented, could lead to the incorporation of work experiences in more undergraduate programs together with recognition that work experience complements the theoretical learning and laboratory experimentation which have traditionally formed the backbone of university courses. These were:

Recommendation 18

We recommend that all institutions should, over the medium term, identify opportunities to increase the extent to which programmes help students to become familiar with work, and help them to reflect on such experience.

Recommendation 19

We recommend that the Government, with immediate effect, works with representative employer and professional organizations to encourage employers to offer more work experience opportunities for students.

Knapper and Cropley (1985) consider that a purpose of HE should be to provide a basis for lifelong education or learning. They contrast the ‘old’ with the ‘new’ as polarizations: knowledge for its own sake vs transmission of knowledge; elite professions vs mass higher education; critic of society vs agent for social change; specialist vs general. This purpose of HE was emphasized by the wide range of papers address...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Introduction
• Part 1 The place of assessment in higher education
• Part 2 Some assessment methods
• Part 3 Examining assessment
• References
• Index