Online Reporter
Simbarashe Murima, [email protected]
A significant number of tertiary institutions have started their first semester of classes for academic staff and all enrolled senior, sophomore, and freshman students worldwide.
Students enter higher education not only to start learning and studying but also to gain specialised knowledge and skills, acquire critical thinking abilities, and stimulate their intellectual inquisitiveness.
However, to accomplish this, the effective use of Continuous Assessment (CA) becomes critical for students, lecturers, and the institution, as it facilitates the means to validate proficiency levels, confirm learning progress, and examine student virtuosity.
In this context, continuous assessment is defined as a learning technique or approach that involves students being regularly evaluated on their academic performance through the use of assignments, in-class exercises/tests, quizzes, presentations, peer reviews, projects, and reflective journals throughout the duration of a course.
Although continuous assessment is not new, research indicates that it is a perennial problem for many universities, and they struggle with assessment quality, which has detrimental effects on students.
I have noted with concern that often, students are over-assessed during the learning process.
Many students become distressed by the competing assessment requirements across their courses, with anxiety about ambiguous instructions, submission clashes, and clusters of high-stakes assessments at the end of the semester.
Substantially, the challenge arises when students are overloaded by assessments, which can hamper their motivation and psychological well-being.
For example, most universities require students to undertake a maximum of five modules per semester, which implies that each student will have to complete a maximum of 15 or more graded and ungraded formative assessments, excluding summative assessments.
From the standpoint of the student, this presents a challenge since the above-revealed assessment loads might result in exhaustion, less time for them to study and finish future assessments, and, as a result, an increased likelihood of truancy and/or committing plagiarism.
Conversely, from a lecturer’s perspective, high assessment loads combined with high assessment weighting grades and a large class size of more than 35 students will result in undue pressure.
Likewise, lack of time to provide sufficient, high-quality feedback and preparation for teaching due to the time spent marking distorts the assessment quality in tertiary learning.
However, in order to prevent such hazards, instructors and administrators should make sure that the number of assignments, their complexity, and the amount of time allotted are meaningfully balanced.
As I see it, a pragmatic solution is essential; for instance, universities may consider embracing the modular system adopted by Zimbabwean universities in 2021 to replace the traditional semester system.
Modularisation is a systematic teaching approach in which university courses are broken down into smaller, self-contained, reduced modules, often with shorter timeframes and continuous assessments.
Thus, this method helps reduce students’ pressure by eliminating the assessment burden by evenly spreading the assessments over the semester.
In the interest of averting over-assessing, lecturers should ensure that their ongoing evaluations measure what they want their students to imbibe, comprehend, and be able to do, and not just what is convenient or easy to assess.
Moreover, lecturers may also include students in the assessment process to boost their motivation, engagement, and sense of ownership over their education, as well as their self-regulation and understanding of their learning outcomes and processes, to prevent over-assessing.
