On trust in teaching and assessment

I spent much of today looking at examination materials from the past academic year. It's a truism that university students are these days over-assessed. It is a frequent topic of conversation among academics, and common comment from external examiners.

Reading one set of scripts in particular, I was struck by the combination of both number and variety of questions and it made me reflect on the very idea of teaching practices.

A key reason for over-assessment is fear. The lecturer fears that the students will learn only those things which are directly assessed, and so take steps to ensure that as great a range of material as possible is covered by the assessment. This results in a kind of arms race between lecturer and student, an unstable game in which the student finds the path of less effort to a successful completion of a module and the lecturer refines the requirements to eke out ever more effort and commitment from the student. This rather adversarial approach of course tends to multiply the questions imposed, or forms of assessment used.

A second manifestation of this fear is the secret assessment - the exam paper dropped on the students which can have any of a wide range of potential topics such that the student is, in principle at least, forced to learn as widely as possible in the module in order to be certain of being able to answer enough questions to pass.

What struck me today was the realisation that this approach to assessment also involves a deep distrust in the lecturer's own teaching methods. That is, the lecturer implicitly believes that what they are doing during the course of a semester is ineffective.

If a lecturer were confident in their methods then having gone through the process will be sufficient to be confident that students had learned. The typical experience, I warrant (drawing substantially on my own history, but also conversations with colleagues) is that correcting examinations is a fraught endeavour precisely because it feels like the lecturer is grading themselves. (I think this experience of vulnerability at the core of or professional identity is what produces the striking rates of procrastination involved in grading assessments.) Marking is a vulnerable time when our own failings will be starkly reflected in all of the weaknesses of our students' responses.

Now, it might be the case that the methods used are excellent and do work, but over-assessment is still an indicator that the lecturer doesn't fully believe that.

And yet, I'm not sure how much reflection on our practices, and changing them to increase their validity and increase our confidence in them, goes on. Certainly, I, like many of my colleagues, take an explicit and cyclical interest in my practice and try to improve it, but it is not a consistent and explicit thing, nor, more crucially, does it explicitly involve the question of what it would take to make me confident in my teaching practice.

In recent years, I have come to increasingly depend on a range of different teaching and assessment practices that involve both continuous practice and reflection by the students. I can attest that it is has made me more confident about both my teaching and my assessments - that is, I worry less and enjoy them more. But the realisation that struck me today is likely to stick with me, and become a key tool for me to consider what constitutes good teaching, and good assessment in the future.