When we think of assessment, we often think of high-stakes activities like timed and final exams and theses, but there are many other ways to assess and promote student learning, and some may be more effective and more closely aligned with your learning outcomes for the course.

Broadly, there are two types of assessments, summative and formative, each with a variety of approaches and each with different goals and should be used for different purposes.

The goal of summative assessment is to evaluate student learning at the end of an instructional unit or term based on established goals, criteria, expected standards. Summative assessments are often “high stakes,” which means they have a higher point value and carry a lot of weight in the final grade. Examples include:

• Mid-term and final exams
• Final projects or papers
• Senior or capstone project

In contrast, the goal of formative assessment—sometimes called authentic assessment—is to monitor student learning to provide ongoing feedback that can be used by instructors to improve teaching and by students to improve learning. More specifically, formative assessments:

• Help students identify their strengths and weaknesses and target areas that need work; and
• Help faculty recognize where students are struggling and address problems immediately.

Formative assessments are generally “low stakes,” which means that they have low or no point value. They are opportunities to practice in order to improve learning. Examples include:

• Concept maps
• Critical reflections
• Summarizing the main point of a lecture or lesson
• Feedback on drafts
• Discussion boards
• Explaining incorrect answers
• And so much more

Integrating many opportunities for formative assessment is a key way to center student learning when designing your assessment plan for the course. When you provide students with regular opportunities to check for understanding, test new ideas, reflect, correct, and revise, you support significant learning, and make it more likely that they will do well on the summative assessments. Formative assessments also provide you, as the instructor, information that can be used to help shape your teaching throughout the quarter.

✔️ To determine the most appropriate types of assessment to use, consider what you want students to learn.

✔️ Allow students to demonstrate learning in a variety of ways with ample feedback and many opportunities to reflect, correct, and revise.

✔️ Focus on higher-order skills of analysis, critical thinking, problem solving and communication of thought process and solutions, as opposed to factual recall.

✔️ Spread assessment throughout the term, rather than relying on a small number of high-stakes exams or a final paper. Break large projects into small assignments and activities.

✔️ Provide opportunities for and encourage collaborative work.

✔️ Allow (or require) students to consult many sources to answer question

Formative (as opposed to summative) assessment allows students to practice in a “low stakes” environment and allows you to gauge students’ progress, point them in the right direction, make suggestions, provide encouragement and praise, identify gaps, and correct misunderstandings. Formative assessment is any activity on the way to a culminating (i.e., final or summative) assessment for which you assess students’ performance.

Providing high-quality feedback in formative assessment is of utmost importance. The FIDeLity model is a useful approach to the provision of feedback (and a rather clunky acronym):

Frequent: Give feedback daily, weekly, or as frequently as possible. This can be done via comments in Speedgrader or through automatically generated feedback in quiz questions.

Immediate: Give feedback as soon as possible. Make sure that you schedule time for yourself immediately after students submit their work.

Discriminating: Make the differences among poor, acceptable, and exceptional work as clear as possible. One of the best ways to do this is to use a grading rubric (see below on this page).

Loving: Be compassionate in the way you give feedback. Harsh feedback is typically received as punishment, and punishment leads to aversion.

Facilitate the development of self-assessment (reflection) in learning.

• Ask students what kinds of feedback they would like.
• Assign reflective activities.

Encourage teacher and peer dialogue around learning.

• Ask students to identify examples of feedback they found helpful.
• Use guided peer review.

Help clarify what good performance is (the goals, criteria, and standards expected).

• Use grading rubrics to make expectations clear.
• Provide students with worked examples.

Provide opportunities to close the gap between current and desired performance.

• Encourage students to resubmit revised work.
• Contact students who have earned low scores on an assignment with the “Message students who” feature in the Canvas Gradebook.

Deliver high quality information to students about their learning.

• Relate feedback to predefined criteria.
• Provide actionable feedback, not just information about strengths and weaknesses.

Encourage positive motivational beliefs and self-esteem.

• Use low-stakes assessments for formative feedback.
• Make grades final only after giving students a chance to revise.

Provide information to teachers that can be used to help shape the learning.

• Ask students to identify what they find difficult when they submit work.
• Use anonymous one-minute papers with the Canvas Survey feature at the end of a Zoom session.

Intervene wisely.

• Check out the different interventions you can use to help students find meaning in their learning.

As naïve as it may seem, you may get better results by promoting academic integrity than by trying to stop cheating. You can find out more information about this approach on websites developed by MIT and UCSD, among others. Perhaps the most that you, as an instructor, can do is to present to students with a strong argument for the benefits of maintaining their integrity, while developing minimally cheat-proof assignments.

Promoting academic integrity involves making explicit to students that no matter how well or poorly they do on the exam, sacrificing their integrity is not worth it.

You could develop an honor code that you ask students to sign or initial at the start of each exam, or you could ask them to copy or retype a brief statement affirming that what follows is their own work.

If you would prefer to avoid continually asking your students to make a pledge, then just ask them at the end of the exam to compile a list of the external resources they consulted while taking the exam.

While this kind of transparency is not possible for all classes, it stops the “cat and mouse” dimension of monitoring for plagiarism and cheating by helping students to understand that scholarly work is work that builds on the work of others without trying to hide the reliance on sources.

Most importantly, you might want to discuss the following points with your students:

• When you cheat, you circumvent an opportunity to solidify your learning. While this may benefit you in the short run, it will catch up with you eventually.
• Once you have engaged in cheating, you will likely enter your next course unprepared. This will lead to the likelihood of further cheating in the future.
• The stress and anxiety that come from cheating on a test will almost certainly outweigh the stress of preparing to the best of your ability. Moreover, the stress and anxiety that come from cheating remain with you after you take the exam. Nearly all people who have cheated on a test or plagiarized someone else’s work remember having done so for the rest of their lives.

Keep in mind that students enter your class thinking that cheating is wrong, and will generally try to avoid cheating. Research on our campus indicates that many, if not most, acts of cheating arise from a combination of:

• Genuine confusion about what constitutes cheating; and
• Desperation to get an assignment in on time.

Students need to be informed about the specifics of how the academic integrity policy is being implemented in your course.

• Will students be permitted to work in groups? Under what circumstances? How will you grade work done collaboratively?  If you allow consulting between students, consider asking them to record with whom they collaborated to complete the assignment.
• Give detailed guidance about whether students may use external sources on their homework, quizzes, or exams. What kinds of external sources are allowable, and how do you want them cited?
• If the use of websites like Chegg or Course Hero is not permissible for homework and/or for exams, say so in your policy. Given that it is now possible for instructors to retrieve access logs from Chegg, let your students know that you have this capacity and whether or not you intend to use it. In cases where instructors have “caught” students by retrieving logs from Chegg, students have repeatedly said that, had they known instructors could do that, they would not have consulted Chegg. You may save yourself some trouble through communicating this ahead of time. 
• Some instructors have begun adopting a “24-hour rule” (actual amount of time may vary) that allows students to substitute an assignment for the one they originally turned in. Some instructors have found that the “weight” of having committed academic misconduct leads students to want to retract the work and substitute one that contains work that is entirely their own.
• Provide Teaching Assistants or graders with the policy well in advance. Invite their feedback about whether the policy is understandable and sufficiently comprehensive. Many Teaching Assistants are on the front line of discovering student academic misconduct, and may have valuable advice on how to strengthen or clarify your policy.
• Take time in class to communicate the policy to your students, and include a clear statement on your syllabus (see sample here). You can also ask your TAs to spend time in section going over the academic integrity policy for your class in the first week.
• Encourage your students to communicate with you and your TAs if they are unsure about what constitutes cheating, or if they are having difficulties completing an assignment. If you can help students problem-solve before they cheat, you may not only prevent cheating but also strengthen learning.
• To help ensure that your students understand the policy, consider having them complete a Quiz in Canvas  that checks their understanding of the policy. Some instructors also ask students to sign a pledge to accept the academic misconduct policy.

To have this loaded into your course in Canvas, along with other campus resources, do this or contact tlc@ucsc.edu.