Innovative assessment at M-level symposium

The symposium which was held on 18th July 2011, was the second M-level symposium organised by the Learning and Teaching Coordinator Network.

The symposium featured a series of talks which were intended to further the scholarly discourse around M-level assessment. There were opportunities for colleagues from across NTU to engage with these ideas and to share their experiences of the topic.

The programme and PowerPoint presentations are available to download:

Introduction
Helen Boulton, School of Education

View the PowerPoint presentation

Rethinking Project work at Masters level
Liza Pybus, Nottingham Business School

Within the Business School we had a major rethink of all our full-time MSc awards last year. One of the more radical aspects of this redesign was a decision to take out individual dissertation modules and replace them with a team based Applied/Consultancy Project. We had found that on these one year intensive programmes with a large international student contingent, many were struggling to find a focus/research base for dissertation projects. This session will explore the nature of the Applied/Consultancy project and lead to a discussion on the variety of approaches to project work at masters level.

View the PowerPoint presentation

Reflection: assessing the journey and the destination
Jane Ching, Nottingham Law School

Nottingham Law School has been working with legal practitioner students, both senior and junior, for almost 20 years, encouraging and assessing their reflections on their learning. Learning the process is often amongst the learning outcomes and assessment of a piece of reflective writing may be the sole assessment. This session will outline the lessons that we have learnt and discuss some of the challenges that are faced when assessing reflection.

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Finding a common assessment element across Sectors and disciplines at Master's level
Leslie Arthur and Alan Crisp, School of Architecture, Design and the Built Environment

Working at Master's level, particularly across programme clusters and schools, experiencing that which may be described as 'multi-disciplinary' study, leaves one with the problem of assessing individual and group work of an eclectic nature, trying to find commonality in an area described by Garcia [Garcia 2007] as [Un]Common Ground.

After much discussion and many experiments the authors concluded that the one consistent common activity practised by all our Master's students was 'decision making'.

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As in all design activities methodologies and methods are taught e.g., Pugh, French, Cross and Pahl and Beitz, [a systematic design approach to concept evaluation developed in Germany after World War II]. All these methodologies use a system of design weighted matrix in an attempt to remove subjectivity from decision making, systems usually developed and dumbed down from one invented by Carlos Fallon to compliment value analysis techniques employed by General Electric. We decided to introduce the students to this formalised decision making system and use it across all forms of decision making, assessing their analysis, evaluation and use of 'Combinex'.