Administering Assessment

1. Administering Assessment Janet Annetts

2. What does “Administering Assessment” mean to you? Each person think of one aspect of administering an assessment – whether a formal exam / informal judgement / formative assessment / summative / ispative / initial interview ...

3. Administering Assessment • Ensuring Adequate Preparation of • The administrator (do you need a course?) • The student (knowing what they should do) • The room / equipment / test materials etc • Doing it correctly according to the manual’s requirements to ensure reliable, valid and accurate results • Correctly scoring tests

4. Administering Assessment • Security of test materials - responsibility • The Test Area • Student support – Access Arrangements • Starting the test – managing • Preventing cheating • Ending the test

5. Practical Application of Administration of Assessment • Making criteria clear • “Don’t just publish the assessment criteria in student handbooks or on relevant websites. Bring the benefits of tone of voice, body language, and eye contact to bear upon the clarity of the marking criteria. Explain them in lectures and tutorials, face-to-face with students. Ask students to ask you questions about how the marking criteria work in practice. • Give students the chance to apply marking criteria. For example, get them to mark some past work in a whole-group setting such as a lecture, using the criteria, before setting out to do some similar coursework, or before they get into revising for related exam questions. In practice, students only really know what marking criteria mean when they have tried to make judgements themselves using the criteria. • Get students to self-assess their own coursework at the point at which they submit it for marking, using the same criteria as will be used for tutor assessment of the work. Then give them feedback about how well their self-assessment has worked in practice, and guidance about particular criteria where there was a gap between the self-assessment and tutor assessment.” • from Making Teaching Workby Phil Race and Ruth Pickford

6. Practical Application of Administration of Assessment • Making it Fair • “Explain to your students the efforts which go into making assessment arrangements and marking as fair as possible. Explain that draft exam questions (for example) are discussed by committees or assessment boards and refined and clarified before being set to students. Explain the role of external examiners or moderators, in getting the questions right beyond doubt before students meet the questions. A lot of work goes on behind the scenes in making assessment fair, but students often have no idea about how much is done to the questions and marking schemes before they meet the questions.” • from Making Teaching Workby Phil Race and Ruth Pickford

7. Bibliography or rather web links! • http://phil-race.co.uk • http://www.realtraining.co.uk/downloads/educational_testing.pdf • http://www.hr-guide.com/data/G365.htm • http://www.teachfind.com/qcda/teacher-assessment-qcda