Giving students options when it comes to assessment

When you present about optionality in university assessments, it usually ends up with a discussion on resources. But then, which higher education discussion doesn’t these days? I want to explore some straightforward ways in which you can present options in your assessment to your students. 

First, it’s important to identify why options are important to your students. From our national QAA collaborative enhancement project, which was a collaboration between the University of Manchester, University of York, UCL and Imperial College London, we surveyed more than 500 students and there was a resounding plea for more options to be embedded into assessment. Why? Their reasons include:

• Tailors the assessment to individual learning approaches and preferences
• Offers the opportunity to flex learning around personal circumstances
• Reduces stress
• Provides a sense of empowerment and increased autonomy
• Creates an opportunity for students to incorporate their own experiences, previous learning or preferences into the assessment
• Improves motivation and engagement with my studies
• Allows choice in which skills to develop
• Allows students to have a choice in how, when and what they are assessed in
• Improves academic achievement.

One student participant from our study said, “optionality in assessment can not only reduce barriers to success for students with ADHD but also provide them with opportunities to demonstrate their knowledge and skills in ways that traditional assessments may not capture”. 

Our study found a lack of definitions in options in assessment. Our project identifies the common types of options as follows:

Word count: offering a varied limit on the words acceptable. For example, 1,000 words +/- 10%
Question to answer: for example, in an exam, you are often presented with the request to answer two of a selection of four or more questions
Submission date: for example, submit the work by a specific deadline but students can submit any time up until that point
Team or individual: for example, allowing students to work on their own or in pairs or groups on an assessment
Zero weighting: for example, allowing students to remove the weighting of a grade in their profile of marks
Choice of assessment criteria to be applied to the work: for example, a student might want a specific criterion for a particular institutional learning goal and outcome (ILO) aligning to an assessment
Negotiated task: for example, where a student discusses the assessment options and negotiates the parameters with the lecturer directly. This could be done individually or as a group
Programmatic choices: for example, a student may prefer to build a portfolio of work to adhere to ILOs set across a year or programme
Format choice: for example, students choose whether to submit an essay, blog or poem.
The potential options in assessment above are all discretionary and based on appropriate context and rationale for embedding. My advice is to identify feasible options and open up discussions on these with your students. Let optionality in assessment engage in autonomous active learning for your students.

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Another student said, “I feel more in control of me…lol I don’t want to say fate, but that’s how it feels. The outcome. I feel more in control, and more confident in my assessment.”

By identifying the type of feasible options in assessment and discussing this with your students, you will naturally build their confidence in their assessment. So how can you add optionality in assessment without upsetting various colleagues and family members? Here’s some advice to support:

• Consider which options in assessment will work for you and your colleagues in terms of your resources and capacity
• Early in the term, talk to your class about the possible options in assessment you can offer them and ask for their preference
• Don’t offer lots of options for assessment. Try to identify three or four possible options and ask students to agree to one of these to begin with
• Keep signalling to the students their available choice and remind them of their leadership and ownership of this choice taken
• Track student grades and feedback in relation to the option in assessment
• Write a blog post on how awesome options in assessment are!

Miriam Firth is a senior lecturer in education management and leadership at the University of Manchester.

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