Student evaluation

We had a heated discussion about student assessment yesterday after dinner. A few points:

I do not agree with the point that if instructor comments and student follows these comments this means higher mark. For me giving 9 (Dutch system) means that student is independent in understanding material, transforming it and expressing new ideas. If he (she) is building only on my comments, this is not independent, so it’s only 8.

Giving measurable criteria for observing such independence and measuring the quality of someone’s own ideas is not an easy task (at least for me). I still rely on intuition – somehow I know it. It works like that for all my courses, in spite of very detailed assessment system with a lot of criteria and certain amount of points for them, I don’t really calculate the mark – I know it.

I think that clarifying evaluation criteria is a joint responsibility of student and instructor, so if student would ask “why you did not tell us before?” I would answer “why you didn’t ask?” (In fact I’m not so bad and trying to articulate as much as possible, but it not always work).

Hmmm, my evaluation of students is so biased…

Archived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2002/08/07.html#a105; comments are here.

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Tagged as: learning facilitation