Assessments face ‘standardisation’ as cuts hit academic workload

Academics have warned that student assessments will become increasingly “standardised” as job cuts and workload pressures leave staff unable to cope with growing piles of marking.

With as many as 10,000 jobs expected to go from UK higher education this year, concerns have been raised about what working conditions will be like for those “left behind”, with growing class sizes seen as “inevitable”.

Academics across the country have now warned that the workload associated with marking was already becoming “unmanageable”, and that assessment methods were likely to change as redundancies put even more pressure on those who escape the axe.

One academic, who wished to remain anonymous, said that assessments were moving towards “standardisation, more formulaic and perhaps shorter assessments” and “maybe more automation”.

“Quite frankly, [we’re moving towards] a more boring and probably less useful form of assessments,” they said. 

Their university was currently reviewing its programmes, resulting in a “super-intensive curriculum simplification”. The need to adapt to workload and budget constraints had “reduced the possibility of doing some of the really creative types of assessments”, the academic said, explaining that in recent years they had introduced tasks such as requiring students to produce short videos or write policy reports.

“What we’re really being told now is that it’s too much,” the academic said, explaining that they were instead being told by their university to move towards “one type” of assessment method due to an “efficiency and cost savings” drive.

This “works against diversity and inclusion”, they said, and raised concerns over the implications for neurodiverse students or those with mental health difficulties, by placing more pressure on a single assessment.

The academic added that they had been told by their university that seminars and small group teaching was “too expensive” and that “everything’s going to have to be done at scale”. This means that they will be moving away from seminars, typically of around 16 to 20 students, to lectures of 100 students. 

“My real fear is that we are going to a very streamlined, impersonal, bulk type of teaching,” they said.

Renata Medeiros Mirra, a lecturer in medical statistics at Cardiff University, added it was “inevitable” that assessments and the “quality of education” will be damaged as workloads increasingly became unmanageable.

Cardiff has announced one of the largest programmes of cuts seen yet in the UK, announcing plans to axe 400 academic staff. A leaked document seen by Times Higher Education outlined that the university intended to increase student-staff ratios following the cuts, but also outlined plans to issue “amendments to assessment practices to ensure that the assessment load is appropriate for staff and students”. 

“When you have those increased student-staff ratios and then you run assessments, you have to consider very carefully which kind of assessments you can run,” Medeiros Mirra said. 

There was the “temptation to move” to more multiple-choice questions and those with shorter answers, she said, which could be more easily assessed by artificial intelligence, but added that “especially in some disciplines like the humanities, that’s just not really possible or ideal”.

Medeiros Mirra echoed the sentiment that there was a shift away from student choice and autonomy. “With small cohorts, you can have almost different assessments, and let students be more in control of choosing topics or things that they might be more interested about,” she said.

“But when the cohorts increase to a certain level, there’s no way you can be marking five, six or seven or iterations of 300 pages. You just have to keep everything very much the same, so that it just makes it work easier.”

The workload pressures extend beyond this, and increasingly academics are forced to provide “much less tailored feedback”, said Tatiana Fumasoli, director of the Centre for Higher Education Studies at the UCL Institute of Education, adding that the “very nice UK model of individual feedback and small group teaching…will probably need to be reassessed”. 

Fumasoli said she almost had a “breakdown” last year due to stress caused by marking, adding that cuts to professional service and teaching assistants had resulted in an “unbelievably larger amount of work for assessments”. 

“It’s a massive loss for the students…It becomes less and less personal, to the point where there’s not really a person behind them who’s marking it, because it’s just all general comments,” added Medeiros Mirra. 

Overall, it was “not easy to be imaginative when it comes to pedagogy or assessment when your departmental staff-student ratios are racing in the wrong direction”, said Steven Jones, professor of higher education at the University of Manchester. 

He questioned whether “senior managers fully understand the extent to which students’ learning is affected by academic cuts”.

“We need to be upfront about longer term consequences. Students’ learning – and therefore future National Student Survey scores – is very likely to be negatively impacted by cuts to the frontline workforce.”

juliette.rowsell@timeshighereducation.com