Testing and Grading

Challenges Related to Traditional Forms of Assessment and Suggested Alternatives

The first concern is related to the fact that numerous learners underperform during an examination, whilst others not only perform well but also eventually get used to and take advantage of the imposed system. The resulting outcome clearly provides an irregular assessment of all the learners, thereby giving an unfair advantage to some, whilst not ensuring that all learners are tested and graded fairly. Summative examinations often give rise to disturbing experiences for some learners who unfortunately consider education a burden, whilst those learners who exploit the education system can potentially generate false-positive outcomes. Some learners who are not necessarily top achievers manage to climb the established academic ladder and access top positions and jobs for which they are not prepared or capable of managing.

To ensure that an assessment methodology provides a grade that is truly representative of the learner’s academic accomplishment, it needs to be formative rather than summative and embedded within the progression of the academic programme [Page 1547]to better reflect the real academic achievement of individual learners. Furthermore, in order to ensure that learners are being appropriately and academically guided throughout their learning experience, they need to be provided with continuous feedback, and feedback upon feedback, to ensure a formative and healthy academic experience. Feedback facilities can easily form part of a virtual learning (online) environment that provides an ideal forum for mature learners to assist each other as well as an effective way to electronically keep track of all the learners’ contributions that factor into their formative assessment as part of the distributed system.

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