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Abstract
What constitutes a great rather than an ordinary design for assessment in higher education? What should assessment activities aim to achieve? The role of assessment is often so taken for granted that it is easy to lose sight of what assessment should influence. For too long criteria such as reliability, validity and conventional practicality have led to assessment practices that may be sufficient to satisfy colleagues, but are not particularly valuable for students. Not only may these practices not lead to further learning, but they may have consequences that lead to short-term thinking, inhibition of some kinds of learning and inappropriate dependency on teachers and assessors. The presentation argues that great designs for assessment must primarily be judged in terms of the effects they have on learning and that designs that meet narrow measurement criteria are necessarily inadequate. It identifies key features of such designs and opens up discussion about what assessment that satisfies these features might look like and how digital media might be used to realise them.

Audio notes
Hello, I’m Dave Boud. Welcome to my presentation. The title ‘Great Assessment Designs’ was suggested by David Nicol. It was not one I would have thought of myself, but having been given it I can see why it is particularly good. It enables me to jump over ‘merely good practice’ to aim for what is excellent assessment practice. This is particularly important as what is often passed off as good advice in assessment can be sadly mediocre and while it may be an advance on what traditionally occurs, it is too parochial and does not aspire to the high standards we are seeking in higher education. Focusing on this topic made me realise once more how often our emphasis in assessment is not on excellence, but on minimising risk and accepting the second rate. With these, what I hope are, provocative remarks, I’d like to start.

I am passionate about assessment because I think that a lot of what we subject students to is quite appalling. It is not compatible with our teaching aspirations and it locks students in to a dreary and backward looking version of knowledge. It doesn’t have to be like this. We can feel so constrained by the pressures of accountability on us that we inadvertently create assessment activities that can be justified technically but which do nothing for students and their learning. The question I want to address here is: how can it be different? What do we know about assessment design that can lead us to create tasks that our students will remember as worthwhile and satisfying and that we will be pleased to engage with? At the end of the day, unless we find assessment worthwhile and satisfying we will never persuade our students that it is otherwise. Let’s see where this will take us.

The structure of this presentation:
It starts with three slides providing an overview of the argument I am making. Following that, each point of the argument is summarised in one slide that follows. For ease of navigation each point in the exposition is numbered.

In preparing this presentation I have chosen a form I am familiar with: the set of powerpoint slides, but I have been more explicit in what I have put on them than if I were physically present to make a commentary. I have not produced a fully argued text as I think the bare bones version you will see might provide more scope for discussion as you read between the lines and offer your own versions of some of the arguments. Do join in and contribute to the discussion. I want to know how you respond to what I have to say and what you have to add to the debate about what constitutes great assessment!