Good Practice in Student Assessment
Assessments should allow reasonable judgement to be made about the extent to which the student has achieved the intended outcomes; in addition assessment should support learning and not undermine it (Nightingale, 1996b)
This web page attempts to give an overview of the purposes, trends, issues and various methods of assessment used both in UCD and internationally. Assessments often drive student learning and as such can change the focus of the way in which students learn. Many University students in Ireland have come through the Leaving Certificate syllabus, which is heavily assessed by the written examination. Alternative approaches to assessment will be new to many students and therefore it is important to explain the purpose of alternative assessments to students.
Assessment and evaluation are terms that are often used interchangeably. For the purpose of the complete Centre for Teaching and Learning web-page, the term assessment has been used to denote the process whereby judgments are made about the quality of students' work. The term evaluation has been use to denote the process of making judgments on the quality of programmes or of teaching.
Main Contributor to this web page is: Dr. Geraldine O'Neill, Centre for Teaching and Learning, who was also lead editor of a 2007 publication on 'Case Studies in Assessment of Student Learning in Higher Education' . This is available on-line on the AISHE website and was funded by a HEA Target Initiatives project.
