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A clarification of our feedback and assessment principles, a clearer feedback service standard, and a cosmetic tidy up.
1. Principles of Feedback and Assessment
Following discussions with faculties and within Education Committee of the principles underpinning our practices when we design, set, mark and provide feedback on assessment methods and tasks, an agreed set of principles has been added to the start of the Assessment Framework. These principles emphasise the centrality of assessment in both learning and progression, and the importance of feedback in enabling these two goals. The new principles can be reviewed in full below:
Assessment Feedback
- Feedback must be timely. Students must be provided with feedback in timescales that ensure they can use the feedback to improve their performance in upcoming related assessments and enhance their broader understanding and skills.
- Feedback must enhance learning. The purpose of feedback is to support students to understand how well they have met the assessment brief and to help them improve their performance in the next assessment or module. Feedback to students can satisfy this requirement by providing both a mark justification AND developmental feedback.
Assessment Design
- Programme and Module leads/teams must design a clear approach to assessment and explain it to students. Assessments must be aligned clearly with stated learning objectives and outcomes at both programme and module levels, and students must be able to understand the rationale for the assessment design.
- Assessments must prepare students for their futures. Assessment designs must meet our dual responsibilities to provide degree credentials that have unquestioned academic integrity while also providing sufficient variety in summative assessments to ensure students are prepared for success in their futures.
- ‘Feedback’ should be the central pillar of all assessment design to ensure students are supported to learn optimally from their performance in each assessment.
2. Service Standard Clarifications
The language throughout Chapter 4 has been reviewed to ensure that we are using working days as the measurement of time throughout. This provides greater clarity for staff and students, and respects periods of time where we expect staff and students to normally not be working, such as weekends, bank holidays, or closure periods.
For example, this means that the marking service standard has now been defined as 20 working days, rather than the previous “four weeks”.
This change will need to be clearly communicated to colleagues and students.
3. A Sign of Things to Come
We have started the process of simplifying the presentation of Chapter 4, in line with work that will be commenced in 2024-25 to review the look, feel and purpose of the Academic Manual. You will notice for example, that we have removed material that is repeated elsewhere, to ensure that the presentation is cleaner, the overall chapter is shorter, and we minimise the risk of information getting out of sync between Chapters and Sections.
More detail on the review of the Academic Manual will follow in Term One.