Our Assessment and Feedback Principles
Assessment principles
Purposeful and developmental
Assessments are purposeful and developmental, they promote and facilitate students’ learning, engagement and understanding, ensuring that students are able to benchmark their current level of knowledge and skills.
Valid
Assessments are aligned to learning outcomes for the module/programme and allow students to demonstrate their knowledge, skills and level of achievement against these learning outcomes by the end of the module/programme.
Clear, reliable, and consistent
Assessments and associated criteria are designed so that they can be clearly understood and so that student work can be reliably and consistently assessed.
Inclusive
Inclusive assessment practices benefit all students by taking into account the diversity of students’ experiences, circumstances, strengths, skills and knowledge, aiming to ensure that the ways in which we assess do not exclude or unfairly disadvantage some students.
Equitable
Equitable approaches to assessment fairly evaluate students’ performance and provide every student with an equal opportunity to demonstrate their achievement.
Compassionate
A compassionate approach to assessment involves designing assessment tasks that are sensitive to lived experiences and positionality, and are mindful of well-being considerations.
Feedback principles
Meaningful
Feedback relates to the stated learning outcomes and assessment criteria. It should be used as an opportunity to promote further learning and facilitate the ongoing development and improvement of the students’ work.
Dialogic
Dialogic feedback involves conversation and discussion with students during their programme of study about the feedback they have received and how they might use it in order to actively engage in their learning.
Timely
Timely feedback occurs when it is likely to have the most impact on students’ learning and performance in subsequent assessment tasks. Expectations in relation to feedback turnaround time should be consistent and clearly articulated.
Clear and consistent
Clear and consistent feedback enables students to understand and interpret the feedback they have been given.
Constructive and supportive
Constructive and supportive feedback enables and motivates students to understand and focus on what they need to do to improve and develop their learning, ensuring an inclusive approach which takes into account the diversity of students’ experiences, circumstances, strengths, skills and knowledge.