Assessment in the Eyes of a Student.

In the eyes of many students, assessments are seen as the most important aspect of a course. It’s often the first thing a student looks at on a syllabus; I know it was for me. They aren’t initially concerned with the learning goals, office hours, or reading assignments, they tune into when they will have they’re exams, when they will take quizzes, or when they need to turn in assignments. They care about how and when their understanding of course content will be assessed. Often, the assessment will determine their grade and will greatly impact how well they think they did in the course. To the average student, assessment is usually the whole reason they do anything in the course. Assessment results merge together and put a label on the student, A performer, B performer, etc. A collection of these labels can have an enormous impact on their future and the student will have to adapt their future plans accordingly.

On a more positive note, an assessment can be of use to the student in more ways than one. The student can use the assessment as motivation to work hard in the course, which will result in them learning the material. Assessments usually are accompanied by some sort of feedback and the student can use this feedback to better their understanding. Assessments can also be used to challenge a student’s understanding and expose their reasoning skills. Assessments are often presented in a form that will provide practice for future tasks and are directly preparing them for their future, i.e. assessing a nursing student’s ability to check blood pressure.  Regardless of whether the student can or cannot directly see the correlation to their future, assessments, both summative and formative, are essential to student learning.