Chapter 5

Student Assesment in Mathematics

The Importance of Assessment

Student assessment is traditionally regarded as the bane of the academic’s life. Unlike schoolteachers, most of us mark our own students’ work, and the load it represents is not always welcome. But in fact this should be regarded as positive and valuable aspect of teaching in higher education, it is an opportunity to see how your students have progressed and the impact of your teaching. It is a serious business and taken seriously it is difficult, but it is also important. If you are really interested in your teaching then it is informative and (hopefully) rewarding. The skills of good assessment are developed over long and varied experience. All we can do here is provide advice, ‘theory’, suggestions and good practice in assessment in mathematics, that may give you ideas for assessing your own students. By far the most important input to this will however come not from literature such as this, but from talking to colleagues to get to as wide a range of views and experience as possible. The aim is to provide fair assessment for as many students as possible and so provide stakeholders such as employers with some idea of how the students may be expected to perform in their professional roles. This is a tall order and requires careful thought about the purpose and context of any assessment we undertake, including a wide range of human as well as intellectual aspects of teaching and learning (Principle 2).

There are many issues to consider in assessing students. We will want to ensure good ‘standards’ as viewed by a wide range of stakeholders, the department, the university, employers, government, the public, and so on. We will want to be ‘fair’ to the students and give them every opportunity to show us what they can do. We will need to ensure that the assessment provides an accurate picture of what the bulk of the students have learned, so that colleagues can rely on that material in presenting their own modules. Sometimes these different drivers can pull in conflicting directions. For example an examination paper may appear unduly difficult (easy) to an external examiner, whereas in fairness to the students you have made efforts, in the teaching, to take account of their strong (weak) background to prepare them appropriately for the examination. In each case of strong or weak background you may still be providing the students with high standard challenges, but this may not be apparent to the ‘outsider’.

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