Assessment

Assessments allow faculty to gather information about learning and determine whether students are successfully achieving the learning goals of a course. Principles of good assessment and formative assessment work together to form the foundation of successful assessment. By including scaffolding and review strategies, faculty can support students as they work to demonstrate they’ve met the course learning outcomes.

Explore information about principles of good assessment, formative assessment, scaffolding, review strategies and retrieval practices.

Authentic assessments are a valuable tool in encouraging academic integrity in a number of ways:

1. Authentic assessments require students to demonstrate their capacity and competencies
2. Authentic assessments require students to do complex, unique and creative activities, which can make the task itself or the performance of the task more meaningful to the learner. These tasks are likely to be rewarding, increasing student engagement, and therefore encourage academic integrity
3. By design, problems or tasks that are authentic may have many solutions. Students use their theoretical knowledge to construct responses to problems that have a level of complexity and ambiguity not seen in standardized tasks.
4. Authentic assessment speaks to universal design principles, enabling students the opportunity for multiple means of expression.

Explore definitions and examples of authentic assessment, including resources to help you design one.

Tests, exams and quizzes are common assessment methods in postsecondary education. These types of assessment can be designed in multiple ways to fairly assess students’ progress in their course learning.

Consider alternatives to closed book tests and options to individualize test questions to encourage academic integrity.