Modern assessment methods for large cohorts

Academic secondee: Graham Compton

As a result of its considerable expansion, the sport-cluster of courses now have the largest number of undergraduates in the School of Science and Technology at NTU. Due to this, the Sport Academic Team are working at the highest student:staff ratio in the School. This project considered the issue of assessing such large cohorts.

Processing assessments for large groups is both labour intensive and time consuming, as each single piece of coursework or examination results many staff-hours of work. Not only does this add to workload and stress, but it brings with it issues of timeliness and accuracy. To address this, a number of solutions have been explored over the years. Reducing the number of assessments clearly reduces the time spent marking and commenting, however, if the process is of value, then this loss is undesirable. Moving to short answer questions also reduces the amount written in an examination or assignment, but at the expense of the development of style and a structured argument.

This project focussed on the possibility of using a free-text marking program in the assessment of student work. Phase one concentrated on surveying available systems and summarising their characteristics. The second phase trailed two of these products and compared them with human markers, using a Year 1 report from the Introduction to Exercise Physiology module.