It’s that time of the semester when students are working to finish assignments and teachers are working on grading, assessing the students’ work and hoping to meet the deadlines imposed by university administration, to publish results. Pressure all round.
Just what is this all about? I am marking papers over the next few weeks, once again, and I want to reflect briefly on the whole idea of ‘assessment’ in theological education.
Tertiary education has changed so much since my undergraduate days, when an entire year’s study was assessed by a single three-hour examination. It was a cruel system if you happened to have a bad day, or if (as was my situation) exams induced acute anxiety. I could not eat or sleep properly for weeks—even though in fact I always did exceptionally well in those exams. What induced the anxiety was not simply exams. Equally, what is going on with the ‘assessments’ today is much more than the essays, journals of reflections, and other forms of assignment.
It seems to me crucial to say that tertiary education does inherently require some level of critical appraisal. Without it, we cannot know what we have learned, gained or discovered. Self-assessment is in fact the crucial element here. The educated person learns to evaluate their own thought and work. This is vital for the ongoing practice of the discipline being studied.
That basic dimension should be the primary reason for and objective of other forms of assessment: to help the student to learn better to evaluate their own work—and indeed that of others as well, as a professional, that is one who is actively applying the discipline in which they have qualified.
Assessments should never be about the worth of the person writing the paper. This is the most difficult thing here. Precisely because we applaud those who do well, that is who gain higher grades, from our earliest years of schooling we are wrongly, destructively, trained to imagine that our personal worth is somehow on the line with these assignments. How to communicate the opposite is a very important part of the role of teachers.
It cannot be done by denying it, though we need somehow to say it from time to time. More positively, we have to model the active excitement of learning, exploring, having a go at new ways of thinking and developing ideas or processes—and model that critical self-assessment and evaluation which is essential to academic progress.
As a result, it is vital that assessments are an ongoing part of tertiary education and that feedback is given (by which I mean written or spoken comments, not simply grades) as early and as often in the course as possible. Personally I covenant with my classes to provide that feedback on each piece of work before the next assignment is due—provided they produce that previous work on time.
Assessment is thus a vital form of education. It is not about qualification, getting the grades and earning points towards the degree. Those are consequences, but not the key points. Assessments are about learning to evaluate one’s own work and thus the task of offering feedback is to encourage and further develop that skill on the part of the student. The teacher’s comments therefore need to state why the mark is given: a grading rubric may help, but more to the point is some description of the strengths of the piece, followed by how it might be developed further, what might have made the argument stronger or clearer, etc.
By contrast, one student I know at another university received an essay back with the grade 68% on it and not one word of comment. The student wondered: ‘Why that grade? Why did I not get 58% or 78%.’ Not a thing was learned from this assessment.
Yes, this is a difficult time and the pressures on students to make the deadlines are matched also by the pressures on those of us seeking to evaluate their work. There is always a temptation to do it in a hurry, to make only negative comments, to skip over correcting the grammar (when will they ever learn what to do with apostrophes?)—but if we possibly can, making assessments can be a rich gift to our students and will enable them to become much more proficient practitioners of our disciplines, which is really what we want to achieve.