I was taken aback by the seminar on compassionate assessment.
I have always found assessment a bizarre process: it involves trust and vulnerability, empathy, as much as it does fairness and clarity. How do we assure parity and hold an overview of this process within the year, cohort, but also college?
I am aware that even within my teaching team everyone has different ways of marking, yet this realisation was intensified when listening to others who teach on different courses/ colleges and ideas on how they assess student work.
It was insightful to hear that one of the participants mentioned they mark more leniently students from minority groups or those that might have come from lesser affluent backgrounds. Others mentioned they try to be positive with the grades yet give cutting written feedback as a balancing act of not holding anyone to a bad grade while also sharing their feedback truthfully.
I found myself agreeing yet questioning both positions: How is one to judge where someone comes from and what access that allows them? Could this be characterised as positive discrimination and / or tokenism and how does that differentiation understood by the student? As assessment is a confusing and often stress-inducing process, would the fact of the feedback not reflecting the grades be even more difficult to understand?
I am a strong believer in internal and external moderation. Ahead of the assessment period, all tutors share notes on what is important to feature in a submission. Tutors will make sure to share their feedback ahead of time, so we all crosscheck each other. We internally moderate student work and such as also triple-checked by the year and course leader, both of who are available for case-specific questions. We have also incorporated sessions in the curriculum which allow students to informally assess one another, as a method of making them familiar with the assessment criteria and the process itself (see case study no.3)
I also believe that the NSS and CSS surveys allow us to see if students understand the assessment process and if they feel it is fair to them.
As while undertaking the seminar on Compassionate Assessment I was also in the process of assessing student work, I decided to test some of these methods. I was marking Y1 students, and using my normal criteria, I would have failed a few students. The internal moderator commented on my grading and said that I was being a little harsh. Through conversation, we decided that failing someone in their first term of university would make studies very challenging for anyone experiencing learning barriers. Hence, as this is a pass / fail unit, we agreed to pass the students, yet provide very clear feedback stating our concerns, while prompting the student to arrange a meeting with the Course Leader to continue this conversation in person. This was also a way to highlight the urgency of the matter.
I believe this is was a compassionate decision: it allows students to know where they stand with regards to the assessment criteria, it provides time to reflect and improve, and they are going to be marked by the same tutors who keep an eye on how they work through certain elements of their submission.