Undergraduate summative assessment experiences

Summative assessment is used to qualify students and award accreditation. Employers, learned bodies and associations, contractors of services, patients and a myriad others, expect such qualifications and accreditation to be true and reliable evaluations of the capabilities of the person concerned. However, measuring capability is a complex and difficult undertaking normally involving a range of processes. The matter is complicated by a global increase in cheating driven by high stakes and ready availability of methods and opportunities to dishonestly defeat the assessment processes. There is also a drive for more efficient assessment with lower cost and quicker turnaround. Obtaining individual assessment is logistically more difficult in the face of large student cohorts, and less reliable because of indistinct boundaries between individual work and collaborative work particularly for projects and laboratories. In this paper, some experiences with summative assessment and examination processes including extracting individual measures from team projects, the application and structure of examinations, the use of different types of questions and the efficacy of partially automated grading, will be reviewed.