Over-assessing
It’s that time of year when the first main bulk of assessments are happening and as always this throws up some interesting practices. First, exams were last week. But for many students they have only just handed in their first big assessment, so are going into an exam without any real feedback. This unfortunately is a product of the Semesterisation of the curriculum. I won’t go into how pedagogically inappropriate it is to compartmentalise all aspects of a course into equally weighted credit blocks, that’s a blog in it’s own right. But for you to assess anything of any serious weight, you need to have taught enough of the course before you can assess students. So if your subject requires a student to demonstrate some deep knowledge and understanding then small-scale continuous assessment is probably inappropriate and you’re going to have to assess through a project or essay. But for me, it is wrong…