We all hate assessment

I went to a seminar yesterday on Assessment for/of/as learning. This seminar was part of the requirements for the Certificate of Professional Development I am working towards. This was my 4th... or 5th... seminar and it was by far the best. Typically, a seminar has 20-30 people in it, and is taught by a faculty or staff member. Some of them have been interactive whereas others have been just presentations. Yesterdays was great, and I participated a lot which kind of surprises me, as I usually don't do that. The presenter gave a presentation but facilitated discussion the entire way through. That's a method of teaching I really like. He didn't just ask if there were any questions, he would ask us to give examples and share our own experiences with assessment. I had a really good time, and learned a lot.

Assessment, is probably the worst part of teaching, and many people agree with that. One of the points the presenter made during the seminar was that you need to make sure what you are teaching is valid, are you actually measuring what you want to measure? For example, if I teach 15 students about plant ecology and how to identify flowers in the field, and then for their final project I have them show me what they know by making knitting a bag with flowers on it...is that a valid assessment? No. Because that assessment is not measuring what I want to measure. I want to measure what they know about ID'ing plants in the field, not their knitting or artistic ability.

It is nearing the time where I will have to start grading things. My current grading duties are pretty mild, so I can't complain. I asked the guy about subjectivity in marking, and how many, if not most people at some point, mark say 10 out of 100 papers, and then on the 11th think to themselves "Shoot... I marked the first person to hard" and they go back and change it. I'll admit, I have done this. His advice was... you set the bar and you don't move it. If in the end everyone's marks are too high, that's your fault for setting the bar too low and vice versa. But I do have a big project in the future to mark (120 big projects to be exact). So I will try and take the advice of the presenter and set the bar, and not move it.