Choosing your assessment method

Essays require students to construct a reasoned argument in response to a specific question, assimilating into this argument relevant supporting ideas and evidence. Students are expected to introduce, build, and reinforce their argument, before concluding with an overall statement.  

• Essays usually have set word limits, usually ranging from 1000 to 5000 words, varying between discipline and level of study. 
• At undergraduate level, students are often given the specific problem or question. 
• At postgraduate level, students may be given a specific problem or question or may be asked to identify their own research questions. 

Advantages

• Students may have familiarity with essays from their previous educational experiences. 
• A wealth of resources are available to provide support.  
• Essays can help students develop their critical thinking, evidence gathering, reasoning and written communication skills to make a coherent argument to a chosen audience.  
• Essay writing hones research and communication skills that can be transferred to other forms of professional writing. 
• Word counts encourage information selection and appraisal, succinct communication, and clear messaging.  

Disadvantages

• Students and employers may consider essay writing as less authentic and transferable to a range of employment opportunities than other types of assessment.  
• Essays can be more time-consuming to write and mark than other types of assessment. 
• Interpretations of marking criteria for essays are sometimes subjective, especially where there is a common mark scheme for a range of essay titles.  

Academic Integrity considerations

High risk without appropriate mitigation. Issues can include:  

• Students may purchase bespoke essays from essay mills or use AI to write an essay for them. 
• Students may use paraphrasing tools to adopt and conceal another person’s essay or reword a journal article. 
• Students may collude with friends or family members.

Mitigation options include: 

• Set students up for success by using in-class exercises to practice or prepare sections of an essay (e.g. introduction/conclusion, annotated bibliography, bullet points of core argument) and use supervised peer-review to develop skills and confidence. 
• Include multimedia or reflective components, or support students to craft their own questions on relevant topic areas, to generate personal investment. 
• Discuss the downsides of contract cheating and collusion openly with students and provide clear signposting to support services and opportunities. 

Learn more about Academic Integrity training and support available to students and staff.

Digital solutions

Recommended approaches:

• Moodle Assignment: An Essay assessment can be managed with a Moodle assignment submission point.
  • Ease of use – Staff: Beginner
  • Ease of use – Students: Beginner
  • Moodle assignments are the most common activity set up in Moodle. These are straightforward, for staff to use and for students to submit.
  • Recommended workflows for Moodle assignment summative and formative assessment

Supporting the needs of all learners

Helpful considerations you can make as part of the design and delivery of this assessment include:  

• Draw students’ attention to the type of thinking they will be engaging in when writing their essay; students can sometimes focus on the content and overlook the instruction words in an assignment title, leading them to be overly descriptive rather than analytical or evaluative in their writing.
• Provide students with a range of focused exemplars which demonstrate what a ‘good’ introduction and effective paragraph looks like, explicitly demonstrating why.
• Heavier scaffolding may be required in earlier parts of the course to help students practise and develop their essay writing skills. Lessen or remove the scaffolding as students build their confidence and make progress.

See further information about inclusive assessment strategies that you can embed.

Feedback opportunities

• Different components of essay writing can be assessed in practice form, before students are asked to assemble the parts to make a whole: annotated bibliographies, literature reviews, writing introductions/conclusions, critical thinking tasks. Students may also be asked to write short practice essays. Feedback on these can enable students to understand what actions they can take improve their summative work. 
• Other forms of formative assessment may include: in-class debates; evidence evaluation tasks, discussions focused on persuading/explaining/summarising, or transferring information from one form of writing to another (e.g. an article into a series of tweets). 
• See further information about using technology to support individual, group, or peer feedback; annotation of scripts in Moodle PDF; providing Audio and Video feedback. 

Operational considerations

• QA16 Assessment, marking and feedback:
  • All final projects/dissertations that make a significant contribution to the final classification should be blind double marked (see QA16 section 11 for further information on double marking and agreeing a final mark). If the work is to be double marked the second marker will not normally be familiar with the student’s work and therefore anonymity might be maintained. 

Further information and case-studies

• Using Assessment for Learning for essays
• Reducing Contract Essay Cheating 
• Using Mahara for essays  

A report requires a concise, factual style of writing that is likely to focus on a specific problem, event, or audience. A report may ask a writer to summarise key research, events, or problems and to offer actionable future steps. Reports typically have a prescribed format.

Reports differ between disciplines. Often students are required to produce a report after participating in a practical activity such as fieldwork, laboratory work, work experience or placement, though they may also be focused on appraising secondary sources or data.

Advantages

• Report writing can be an authentic assessment; a task regularly given to employees and students on placement.
• Communicating knowledge clearly and succinctly is a highly transferable skill.
• Reports often follow a specific style within a subject area, therefore feedback can be specific and actionable in future assessments.

Disadvantages

• Consider the frequency of report writing as an assessment. If the style is prescribed and replicated in each submission, it may limit the scope for learners’ development to practice the same set of skills each time.
• Reports can be time-consuming to mark and interpretations of marking criteria to reports are sometimes subjective.
• There is a vigorous industry of ‘essay mills’ that produce written assignment content for students, which can be hard to detect through plagiarism software.

Academic Integrity considerations

High risk without appropriate mitigation. Issues can include:  

• Students may purchase bespoke reports from essay mills or use AI to write a report for them. 
• Students may use paraphrasing tools to adopt and conceal another person’s report or long extracts from someone else’s text. 
• Students may collude with friends or family members 

Mitigation options include: 

• Have students share a portfolio of their preparatory work, research notes, and previous drafts alongside the submission. 
• Ouriginal similarity checking tool can provide information to support consideration of academic integrity issues. 
• Discuss the downsides of contract cheating and collusion openly with students and provide clear signposting to support services and opportunities. 

Learn more about Academic Integrity training and support available to students and staff.

Digital solutions

Recommended approaches:

• Moodle Assignment: can be set up for both individual and group assessments. Using this activity, you can communicate tasks, collect work (e.g. poster) and provide grades and feedback to your students. Students can submit content in various forms including documents, spreadsheets, HTML or alternative formats.
  • Recommended workflows for Moodle individual assignment summative and formative assessment.
  • Recommended workflows for Moodle group assignment summative and formative assessment.
• Moodle Group Peer Review: For assessed group work, a group assignment allows you to provide feedback and marks for the whole group. You can use the Moodle Group Peer Review tool to facilitate peer assessment of contribution to group work. This can help you to determine an individual mark for students, taking account of their peer assessed contribution to group work.
  • Recommended workflows for Group Peer Review summative and formative assessment

Ease of use:

• Beginner - Moodle assignments are the most common activity set up in Moodle. These are straightforward, for staff to use and for students to submit.
• Advanced - Moodle Group Peer Review tool requires careful planning and familiarisation with guidance material, as well as scaffolding for students.

Supporting the needs of all learners

Helpful considerations you can make as part of the design and delivery of this assessment include:

• Provide clear guidelines for specific sections to ensure students do not inadvertently misinterpret the individual components which make up the report.
• Provide templates and exemplars which provide clarity on layout and format.
• If a report depends on a student’s ability to attend sessions, such as lab classes, ensure there is more than one opportunity to do so within a unit, to support those students who many not be able to attend due to circumstances beyond their control.

See further information about inclusive assessment strategies that you can embed.

Feedback opportunities

• This form of assessment provides opportunity to develop students’ peer assessment and feedback skills.
• Formative activity might focus on particular sections of a report and/or discussion of exemplar material from previous cohorts or relevant literature alongside the marking criteria.
• Moodle Assignment provides the facility to give feedback through text (direct feedback comment or uploaded file), *audio (direct 2 min recording or uploaded or streamed file) and *video (direct 2 min recording or streamed file).

Operational considerations

• A clear, generic, subject specific assessment rubric for all report writing will take some time to create, but will lessen the time spent on marking and/or feedback considerably.

See further information on QA considerations.

Further information and case-studies

• CLT guidance on using Moodle Groups 
• Designing maths e-Assessments 

A dissertation is an extended piece of research and writing, which follows many of the same conventions as the essay. Dissertations showcase a student’s ability to become a competent researcher at a level suitable to their programme of study and a producer of knowledge. 

• Students are more likely to have chosen their area of study, designed their own research, and undertaken any practical investigations or primary and secondary data searches themselves. 
• Dissertations tend to include more structural component than an essay, including not only an introduction, main body, and conclusion, but also an abstract, methodology and/or literature review, findings and discussion, and appendices.  
• The word counts tend to range from 5-20,000 words, although this varies between disciplines. 

Advantages

• Writing in this style supports students to develop their critical thinking, evidence gathering, reasoning and written communication skills to make a coherent argument to a chosen audience.  
• Writing a dissertation requires information selection and appraisal and a clear narrative throughout a large body of work.
• Dissertation writing is an exercise in academic commitment and supports students in developing a range of research and written communication skills applicable to future projects in academia and employment.  

Disadvantages

• Students and employers may see dissertation writing as less authentic and transferable to a range of employment opportunities than other types of projects set to assess the end of a course. 
• Dissertations can be more time-consuming to write and mark than other types of final year assessment. 
• Interpretations of marking criteria can be subjective and vary widely between assessors. 

Academic Integrity considerations

High risk without appropriate mitigation. Issues can include:  

• Essay mills provide dissertation and thesis writing services at all levels of study (undergraduate to doctoral). 
• Students may use paraphrasing or translation tools to adopt and conceal work belonging to another author, especially those written in a foreign language or non-digitised work held in repositories.
• Students may ‘cherry-pick’, improve, or even make-up results from experiments or interviews.

Mitigation options include: 

• Set regular submission points for dissertation components, e.g. literature review, introduction, data sets/interview notes, chapters, to monitor student progress and engage them in research and writing discussions over a period of time prior to final submission.
• Include a short viva or reflective component to demonstrate students’ understanding and investment in their own project.
• Use Ouriginality checker on all submitted work.
• Discuss the downsides of contract cheating and collusion openly with students, focusing particularly on the workplace impact of claiming to possess skills you do not, and provide clear signposting to support services and opportunities.  

Learn more about Academic Integrity training and support available to students and staff.

Digital solutions

Recommended approaches:

• Moodle Assignment: A Dissertation assessment can be managed with a Moodle assignment submission point.
  • Ease of use – Staff: Beginner
  • Ease of use – Students: Beginner
  • Moodle assignments are the most common activity set up in Moodle. These are straightforward, for staff to use and for students to submit.
  • Recommended workflows for Moodle assignment summative assessment

Supporting the needs of all learners

Helpful considerations you can make as part of the design and delivery of this assessment include:  

•  If providing an overview to the dissertation structure/skills etc at the start of the year, revisiting guidance with students whilst they are working on the dissertation can be beneficial as they can directly apply this to their learning. For example, research methods guidance, data interpretation, reviewing the literature.
• Interim deadlines or progress markers can help students to breakdown the dissertation into manageable steps in order to build confidence and see progress.
• Refer to other places in the course where students may have encountered elements of the dissertation, helping transfer of skills/knowledge; students can regard this form of assessment as distinctly different and more complex than other forms of assessment they may have engaged in. Support students to see that they have encountered elements of the dissertation previously in the form of critiquing research, formulating a discussion in an essay, referencing etc.

See further information about inclusive assessment strategies that you can embed.

Feedback opportunities

• Different components of dissertation writing can be assessed in practice form: annotated bibliographies, literature reviews, writing introductions/conclusions, critical thinking tasks. Students may also be asked to write short practice essays. Feedback on these can enable students to understand what actions they can take improve their summative work. 
• See further information about using technology to support individual, group, or peer feedback; annotation of scripts in Moodle PDF; providing Audio and Video feedback. 

Operational considerations

• QA16 Assessment, marking and feedback:
  • All final projects/dissertations that make a significant contribution to the final classification should be blind double marked (see QA16 section 11 for further information on double marking and agreeing a final mark). If the work is to be double marked the second marker will not normally be familiar with the student’s work and therefore anonymity might be maintained. 

Further information and case-studies

• Using Assessment for Learning in dissertations 
• Case study: Joint student practice and academic conference

Any reflective assessment that focuses on critical analysis of the learning, and/or development that has taken place over a period of time or following a specified event. Typical examples may include learning journals and/or diaries, blogs, audio/video reflections, personal development planning, placement or work-based learning synthesis, reflective essays.

Advantages

• Personalised. Can show originality and creativity. 
• Allows students to present and reflect on wide-ranging evidence of achievement to show development over time.  
• Good way to bring together synoptic/programme level assessment. Allows supervisors a dynamic view of learner progress.
• Students can demonstrate complex learning outcomes such as critical thinking and analysis.
• Helps develop independent learning and increased learner autonomy.

Disadvantages

• Students may be less familiar with reflective writing and need more support before writing than traditional forms of assessment.  
• Need to be clear how each element of the reflective assessment contributes to a mark. Clear instructions/checklist can help guide student effort. 
• Time may be needed to ensure learners understand the value and purpose of reflective assessments, e.g. by making explicit links to learning outcomes.  
• If introducing a new learning technology (e.g. e-portfolio platform), this involves a learning curve. Allow time for staff development and plan to scaffold learner development.
• Reflective assessment can be time-consuming to mark and interpretations of marking criteria are sometimes subjective.

Academic Integrity considerations

Low/Medium risk without appropriate mitigation. Issues can include:  

• Essay mills and AI tools can produce reflective essays for students, although these services are less easily accessed than for traditional essays. 
• Paraphrasing tools can be used to facilitate copying of another student’s work. 

Mitigation options include: 

• Opportunities to practice in-class and undertake supervised peer-review can build confidence 
• Require multimedia components, audio or video recordings, or have students build a portfolio over a period of time with randomised submission points before the final submission. 
• Provide clear guidance and examples to ensure students understand and are confident with the task, and signpost to support services and opportunities. 
• Use Ouriginal to check for illicit reproduction of work. 

Learn more about Academic Integrity training and support available to students and staff.

Digital solutions

Recommended approaches: 

• Moodle Assignment:  A reflective assessment can be managed with a Moodle assignment submission point. 
  • Ease of use – Staff: Beginner
  • Ease of use – Students: Beginner
  • Moodle assignments are the most common activity set up in Moodle. These are straightforward, for staff to use and for students to submit. 
  • Moodle assignments allow for anonymous marking and similarity checking
  • Recommended workflows for Moodle assignment summative and formative assessment
• e-Portfolio:  An online collection of reflections and digital artefacts (such as documents, images, blogs, resumés etc.). Mahara is the supported, e-portfolio tool at the University of Bath. E-Portfolios can be designed to help students develop their digital skills by sharing reflections in different formats e.g. video, learning journals, personal development planning. They have features to support group collaboration and feedback from staff and peers. 
  • Ease of use – Staff: Advanced 
  • Ease of use – Students: Intermediate 
  • E-Portfolios involve a significant learning curve for staff and students. Staff will need to undertake some training and practice, in advance of an introduction for students. 

Supporting the needs of all learners

Helpful considerations you can make as part of the design and delivery of this assessment include:  

• Reflective prompts can help to scaffold student thinking and ensure that the reflection avoids becoming overly descriptive and is worthwhile. For example, giving students a real- world focus for their reflective thinking or writing can help to ensure that their reflection is impactful.
• Encourage students to draw on positives as well as negatives when engaging in personal reflection, as students can sometimes overlook this.

See further information about inclusive assessment strategies that you can embed.

Feedback opportunities

• Reflective assessments should include integrated formative feedback opportunities to allow students to showcase their learning development. 
• Where students are unfamiliar with reflective assessment, early opportunities for formative feedback will be beneficial.  
• Building in peer feedback activities can help students develop a clear understanding of ‘what good looks like’ in this context. 
• Moodle Assignment submissions can be configured for group submissions, and feedback can be provided to a whole group. For students to review each other’s work, the Moodle Workshop provides options for individual peer assessment. 

Further information and case-studies

• Using Mahara for Reflective Assessments 
• Case study: Boosting engagement with feedback and development of employability skills with an eportfolio (Teaching Development Fund project)

Questions or tasks designed to assess the application of knowledge, analytical, problem solving, or evaluative skills. This type of coursework can be used for either individual or group assessment.

Examples of set exercises - problem sheets; programming tasks; team-based learning activities; in-tray exercise; problem-based learning activities; translation exercises; reading comprehension exercises.

Advantages

• Can be a good example of authentic assessment, linked to real world situations/data, which also aligns well with assessing ‘real-world’ graduate attributes such as problem-solving.
• Collaborative working on group tasks builds interpersonal skills and prepares students for the workplace.  
• Provides a regular opportunity for feedback which the student can then apply to their future learning. Staff can use this form of assessment to shape and adjust their teaching in response to the students’ needs (e.g. revisiting topics, refining a skill). 
• Set exercises can encourage students to transfer and assimilate knowledge across a unit. 
• This form of assessment provides a useful approach for helping to shift students’ perspective on the purpose of assessment; it can help them to see assessment as a fundamental part of their learning rather than simply as an end-point. 

Disadvantages

• Set exercises that involve group working need careful scaffolding and management by the academic.
• Problem sheets – consider whether it’s helpful to provide just the final solution, or whether a fully worked example would help students identify incorrect steps. 
• Consider whether students are likely to have had the opportunity to encounter and practice any ‘new’ type of assessment.   

Academic Integrity considerations

Medium risk. Issues can include:  

• Collusion (especially where all or part of the assignment is groupwork) and copying where the same exercises are recycled year on year and answers may be obtained from other students or from cheat sites where content has been uploaded by previous students. 
• Sophisticated forms of contract cheating can be employed where set exercises are uploaded to essay mills or contract cheating sites.
• AI/paraphrasing tools may be used to recycle previous students’ work if the same problem sheets are used year on year. 

Mitigation options include: 

• Set very clear expectations with your students around collusion and collaboration within the context of the specific tasks; do not rely on general statements.  
• Scaffold the groupwork effectively to reduce anxiety-induced cheating and ensure plenty of support is available in a timely manner throughout the project and write-up phases. You may need to work with your Library and/or Skills Centre representatives to provide this. 
• Consider using ‘faded work examples’ or 'learner generated examples’ (see the Designing maths e-assessment example in Further Information below) to build a pattern of continuous engagement, boost learner confidence, and reduce the likelihood of relying on expensive contract cheating resources.
• Use e-assessment technologies such as NUMBAS or STACK (or disciplinary equivalent) to ensure a wide variety of problem sets are available or create a broad bank of tasks and do not reuse the same ones within a 3-4 year period. 

Learn more about Academic Integrity training and support available to students and staff.

Digital solutions

Recommended approaches:

• Moodle Assignment:  Using this activity, you can communicate tasks, collect work (e.g., problem sheets or in-tray exercises) and provide grades and feedback to your students. Students can submit content in various forms including documents, spreadsheets, HTML or alternative formats.  
  • Ease of use – Staff: Beginner
  • Ease of use – Students: Beginner
  • These are straightforward, for staff to use and for students to submit. 
  • Moodle assignments allow for anonymous marking and similarity checking. 
  • It can be set up for both individual and group assessments
  • Recommended workflows for Moodle assignment summative and formative assessment.
• Moodle quiz:  It is a powerful activity that allows you to create exercises ranging from simple, multiple-choice knowledge tests to complex, self-assessment tasks with detailed feedback.  
  • Ease of use – Staff: Intermediate/Advanced 
  • Ease of use – Students: Beginners/Intermediate 
  • Feedback obtained from this activity can help students to identify their strengths and areas for improvement.  
  • Quiz statistics can help tutors identify concepts that students find difficult, or where misunderstandings have occurred.  Future teaching can be adapted accordingly.
  • Recommended workflows for Moodle quiz summative and formative assessment.
• Numbas: It is a maths assessment platform where you can author questions and students' responses are auto marked by the system. NUMBAS allows the randomisation of question parameters so students can work on different instances of the same problem.  
  • Ease of use – Staff: Advanced 
  • Ease of use – Students: Advanced 
  • The MAST group at the Skills Centre (a branch from MASH) offer support to academic departments interested in developing mathematical content for students applying this tool. 

Supporting the needs of all learners

Helpful considerations you can make as part of the design and delivery of this assessment include:  

• Students can feel anxious about falling behind with regular set exercises and may need support and reassurance to catch up.
• Students may need to be reminded that the purpose of set exercises is to help them to develop their skills and knowledge over a period of time, rather than fixating on the individual marks they achieve.
• Make the process surrounding set exercises transparent for students so that they are clear on expectations in terms of how to format and submit their work.
• If implementing new learning technologies for learners with DAPs, staff need to review if the tool responds appropriately to students digital accessibility requirements (e.g. NUMBAS accessibility statement).

See further information about inclusive assessment strategies that you can embed.

Feedback opportunities

• In certain disciplines this type of assessment can require an initial and fully supported guidance from tutors while students understand the methodology and develop the skills required to solve them. 
• Activities set up in Moodle (assignments, quizzes, Wiki pages, etc) allow feedback through text and audio.  
• NUMBAS has highly configurable options for feedback. Staff can configure feedback to be released immediately or on a set date.  
• Overall, most of the technology recommended in this guide has the option to design feedback that includes an appropriate level of detail (e.g., correct answers with an explanation or feedback hints with links to further reading). The time spent setting up feedback in advance can bring benefits by saving marking time and efficiently providing timely feedback to students during the assessment period. 

Operational considerations

TBC

Further information and case-studies

• Case study: The use of Stack for formative and summative assessment in Physics by Dr Fran Laughton 
• Case study: Contextualising NUMBAS resources in Economics by Dr Simona Montagnana 
• Blog: Designing Maths e-Assessments

This type of coursework results in output from project work, often of a practical nature, other than a dissertation or written report. Examples are diverse and may include a new product, model, design or poster. It can be the product of a group or individual effort. 

Supporting learning activity (process) and project output. This type of coursework provides a more creative approach for students to demonstrate their learning. 

Advantages

• Promotes application of knowledge to a real-world context. This enables authentic assessment and more opportunities for greater student choice, responsibility and agency. 
• Supports students to transfer knowledge across units and offers opportunities for reflection.  
• Project work can develop transferable skills (time management, research, and analysis). 
• Encourages problem solving and can develop education for sustainable development skills (critical thinking and innovation) and reinforces higher order thinking skills. 
• Project output that results in a physical artefact (e.g. a model) can be digitised. For example, a series of photos, a 360o photo or video can be submitted to Moodle if ‘evidence’ is required

Disadvantages

• Consider how to maintain student effort and motivation over a longer period.  The learning design may require pre-planned scaffolding activities to aid this.
• Group tasks might be divided into separate tasks completed by individuals, not encouraging the collaboration intended by the assessment design.  
• If prior learning has not prepared students for working through setbacks and hurdles, (which is a natural and useful feature of project work) they may need support to navigate this and recognise the value in this type of learning. 
• Consider how to support groups to work with others, as some students may have not worked in this way before.  

Academic Integrity considerations

Low/Medium risk with appropriate mitigation. Issues include: 

• Collusion (especially where the output is assessed individually when the project was a group task).
• Sophisticated forms of contract cheating can be used where students provide all the prior materials generated during the project to an essay mill or cheat site for a professional to create the write-up.  

Mitigation options include: 

• Set very clear expectations with your students around collusion and collaboration within the context of the specific project.  
• Scaffold the groupwork effectively to reduce anxiety-induced cheating and ensure plenty of support is available in a timely manner throughout the project and write-up phases. You may need to work with your Library and/or Skills Centre representatives to provide this. 
• If the project has been undertaken as groupwork, but the output needs to be done individually, require students to focus on different aspects of the output  (e.g. a how-to manual for new users including trouble-shooting; a launch campaign outlining the product’s current benefits and applications; a proposition paper showcasing its future uses and enhancements) or different types of submissions on the same task (e.g. a written report, a podcast, a video presentation).  
• If the project is undertaken as a group, include a marked section on how the project was managed (e.g. who was responsible for which elements, how time was allocated, how the communication process worked, what challenges were encountered and how they were solved, etc) or require students to keep a project-management log throughout and submit this with their output.  
• Consider including a marked section focused on each individual’s reflection on the process as well as the product.  

Learn more about Academic Integrity training and support available to students and staff.

Digital solutions

Recommended approaches: 

• Moodle Assignments can be set up for both individual and group assessments. Using this activity you can communicate tasks, collect work (e.g. poster) and provide grades and feedback to your students. Students can submit content in various forms including documents, spreadsheets, HTML or alternative formats. 
• For assessed group work, a group Moodle Assignment allows you to provide feedback and marks for the whole group. You can use this in conjunction with the Moodle Group Peer Review tool to facilitate peer assessment of contribution to group work. This can help you to determine an individual mark for students, taking account of their peer assessed contribution to the project output. 
• The Ouriginal similarity checking tool can provide information to support consideration of academic integrity issues. 

Ease of Use

• Moodle Assignments 
  • Staff: Beginner 
  • Students: Beginner 
  • This is a commonly used activity in Moodle and familiar to most staff and students. Assignments are straightforward to set up, and for students to submit digital files. 
  • The ‘group’ assignment functionality may be less familiar and will require some additional training for staff. Groups will need to be set up within Moodle, requiring some manual set up. 
  • Recommended workflows for Moodle individual assignment summative and formative assessment.
  • Recommended workflows for Moodle group assignment summative and formative assessment.
• Moodle Group Peer Review 
  • Staff: Advanced 
  • Students: Intermediate 
  • This is not a commonly used tool and will require some additional training for staff to set up appropriately. 
  • Students will need to be provided with guidance on appropriate levels of scoring and commenting.
  • Recommended workflows for Group Peer Review summative and formative assessment.

See further information including alternative technology options. 

Supporting the needs of all learners

Helpful considerations you can make as part of the design and delivery of this assessment include:  

• Support students to identify smaller goals within the project to monitor progress and provide opportunity for feedback. Students can identify their own goals, breaking down task into smaller steps.
• Refer to other places in the course where students may have encountered elements of project work, helping transfer of skills/knowledge.

See further information about inclusive assessment strategies that you can embed.

Feedback opportunities

• Opportunities for students to practice this type of assessment and receive feedback will be beneficial if they have not experienced project working or a specific output before. 
• May need to identify smaller goals within the project to monitor progress and provide opportunity for feedback. 
• Moodle Assignment provides the facility to give feedback through text audio video. Individual feedback can be created online or offline. Group feedback can be given for the whole group in one go, or taking into account peer feedback, the tutor can provide more personalised feedback. 

Operational considerations

• QA16 Assessment, marking and feedback:
  • All final projects/dissertations that make a significant contribution to the final classification should be blind double marked (see QA16 section 11 for further information on double marking and agreeing a final mark). If the work is to be double marked the second marker will not normally be familiar with the student’s work and therefore anonymity might be maintained. 
  • Group marks cannot be awarded to the whole group unless and exemption is obtained.  Individual marks can be navigated through peer assessment element or a tutor-assessed element.   

Further information and case-studies

• Using Mahara for Portfolios 
• Case study: Boosting engagment with feedback and development of employability skills with an eportfolio by Dr Cressida Lyon
• Case study: Hybrid Learning and Peer Assessment in Engineering by Dr Steve Cayzer
• Blog: Groupwork and Peer Assessment 

A collection of work that relates to a given topic or theme, which has been produced over a period of time, usually associated with work-based or experiential learning. Portfolios can include diverse forms of material including text, image, audio, notebooks, journals, etc.

Advantages

• Provides a personalised and student-centred approach to assessment allowing the student to demonstrate originality and creativity. Opportunity for digital skills development.
• Allows students to present and reflect on wide-ranging evidence of achievement. Students can showcase their development over time. Allows supervisors a dynamic view of learner progress.
• Good way to bring together synoptic/programme level assessment and encourage students to make links in their learning across units. 
• Helps develop independent learning and increased learner autonomy.
• Can offer student choice about what to include in the portfolio by reflecting on their work and choosing best examples. 

Disadvantages

• Students may require guidance on how to engage in reflective writing in order for this to be effective. 
• Need to be clear how each portfolio element contributes to a mark. Clear instructions/checklist can help guide student effort. 
• Assessment workload can be high in terms of student preparation and staff marking. 
• Need to be explicit regarding how the evidence in the portfolio links to learning outcomes. This will help assess the quality of the portfolio. 
• If introducing a new learning technology (e.g. e-portfolio platform), this involves a learning curve. Allow time for staff development and plan to scaffold learner development. 

Academic Integrity considerations

Low risk with appropriate mitigation.

 Mitigation options include: 

• Include a range of assessment formats to give students the opportunity to showcase their strengths and skills in different ways and to make it harder for contract cheating to be employed.
• Ensure the portfolio assesses higher order thinking in intended learning outcomes by requiring students to apply, analyse, evaluate, and create materials rather than simply remember information or showing basic understanding. 
• Avoid recycling questions or topics year on year. If key themes or areas are likely to remain the same, link them to current events or recent hot topics in the field. 
• Include reflective components, especially those that draw together other aspects of the portfolio. 

Learn more about Academic Integrity training and support available to students and staff.

Digital solutions

Recommended approaches: 

• e-Portfolio:  An online collection of reflections and digital artefacts (such as documents, images, blogs, resumés etc.). Mahara is the supported, e-portfolio tool at the University of Bath. E-Portfolios can be designed to help students develop their digital skills by sharing reflections in different formats e.g. video, learning journals, personal development planning. They have features to support group collaboration and feedback from staff and peers. 
  • Ease of use – Staff: Advanced 
  • Ease of use – Students: Intermediate 
  • E-Portfolios involve a significant learning curve for staff and students. Staff will need to undertake some training and practice, in advance of an introduction for students. 
• Moodle Assignment:  A portfolio assessment can be managed with a series of Moodle assignment submission points. You will need to provide a clear timeline of assessment points and feedback opportunities in advance and show how submissions are related. Moodle assignments allow for formative feedback from staff (not from peers). 
  • Ease of use – Staff: Beginners 
  • Ease of use – Students: Beginners 
  • Moodle assignments are the most common activity set up in Moodle. These are straightforward, for staff to use and for students to submit. 
  • Moodle assignments allow for anonymous marking and similarity checking.
  • Recommended workflows for Moodle individual assignment summative and formative assessment.

 See further information including alternative technology options. 

Supporting the needs of all learners

Helpful considerations you can make as part of the design and delivery of this assessment include:  

• A portfolio assessment can support built-in assessment choice, particularly if students are given options on what to include in their portfolio.
• Students may need explicit guidance to demonstrate how their submitted work meets the portfolio marking criteria

See further information about inclusive assessment strategies that you can embed.

Feedback opportunities

• Portfolio assessments should include integrated formative feedback opportunities to allow students to showcase their learning development. 
• Where students are unfamiliar with portfolio assessment, early opportunities for formative feedback will be beneficial. 
• Building in peer feedback activities can help students develop a clear understanding of ‘what good looks like’ in this context. 
• E-portfolio platforms such as Mahara provide opportunities for students to share their work with staff, or with a group of their peers for feedback, for formative feedback comments. Users can easily provide contextualised feedback comments on an e-portfolio page. Students can respond to feedback comments. 

Further information and case-studies

• Using Mahara for Portfolios 
• Case study: Boosting engagement with feedback and development of employability skills with an eportfolio by Dr Cressida Lyon

The visual or recorded presentation of work on a particular topic which does not use a traditional written form. There are many different formats that could be used including posters, infographics, webpages, blogs, podcasts, vlogs, narrated presentations and short films and assessments of this nature can be very authentic. It is essential that clear information on the expected format is provided to students. 

Advantages

• This method recognises that presenting incorporates far more than simply verbally communicating information and allows students to showcase their skills and knowledge in a more flexible way. This can be particularly important if students experience anxiety associated with more traditional forms of presenting. 
• Enables students to employ a creative range of approaches to presenting information visually. This is very useful for assessing higher order thinking skills where students need to make links between ideas or concepts, as visual presentations can support and evidence this type of thinking. 
• Provides an opportunity to develop skills for the modern workplace. 

Disadvantages

• Students may not have equitable access to technology.  
• Students may not have the existing technological skills required and may need to invest time in familiarising themselves with the technology and developing the digital skills required, in advance. Certain considerations may therefore make the assessment more accessible i.e., introducing the assessment in advance, (giving students the opportunity to develop a greater awareness of any tools required) or highlighting a preferred tool that all students should use. 
• Staff need to be confident in providing (appropriate technological) guidance. 

Academic Integrity considerations

Low/Medium/High risk. Issues can include:  

Mitigation options include: 

Learn more about Academic Integrity training and support available to students and staff.

Digital solutions

Recommended Approaches:

• Coursework can be submitted through Moodle Assignment. 
  • Recommended workflows for Moodle individual assignment summative and formative assessment.
• For videos, podcasts or narrated presentations (especially over 50mb) students can submit their work via the Re:View (Panopto) student assignment folder. Staff should create student assignment folders to securely store students’ recorded presentations. Students can create these using a variety of software, such as PowerPoint, Re:View (Panopto), Xerte, Zoom, Teams, or on mobile devices. Video editing can also be done using editing software or design websites (e.g. Canva).
  • Recommended workflows for Re:View (Panopto) summative and formative assessment.

Ease of use:

• Ease of use – Staff: Intermediate 
• Ease of use – Students: Intermediate 
• Guidance should be provided to students on how to use the various forms of technology. Students should be provided with instructional guidance on the different ways to produce their presentations (such as with PowerPoint, Re:View (Panopto), Xerte, etc.). 

See further information including alternative technology options. 

Supporting the needs of all learners

Helpful considerations you can make as part of the design and delivery of this assessment include:  

• Students could be given an element of choice about the format of their presentations.
• If students are presenting online consider whether cameras need to be switched on as part of the assessment criteria.
• Encourage students to give consideration to the accessibility of recoded material for all users, including using captions, transcripts, colour contrast etc. This may be particularly important if students are being peer-assessed.

See further information about inclusive assessment strategies that you can embed.

Feedback opportunities

• Introduce the assessment in advance so students have the opportunity to develop a greater awareness of any tools required to complete the assessment or highlighting a preferred tool that all students should use. Providing students with formative opportunities to engage with any formats or technology also allows students to develop their skills in this way.  
• Opportunities to practise presenting information as part of a group can prepare students better for future, individual assessments.  
• Feedback can be provided via Moodle Assignment submission point. 

Operational considerations

• QA16 Assessment, marking and feedback:
  • Presentations do not need to be marked anonymously. Orals/presentations that make a significant contribution to the final classification should be recorded as appropriate, and such assessments are subject to the same principles of internal and external moderation as written assessments (see QA16 section 11.9). 

Further information and case-studies

• Blog: Can VR and AI Improve Soft Skills? 
• Blog: Does Being Off Camera (Still) Matter? 

An oral presentation on a given topic which could also be followed by a question-and-answer session. The timing and format of the presentation should be specified. 

Advantages

• Oral presentations enable us to assess a student’s verbal skill, which is particularly useful when trying to evidence a student’s ability to engage an audience and present ideas in an informative and persuasive way. 
• Enables a subject based discussion (promoting greater student engagement, interaction and feedback) with a level of immediacy that might not be provided through other forms of assessment. 
• Oral presentations are a principal professional skill in a variety of industries; it is important to provide students with opportunities to practice and hone such skills throughout their academic journey. 

Disadvantages

• Fear of presenting, when not appropriately managed and scaffolded via prior opportunities to practise this skill, may undermine a student’s ability to demonstrate their true potential. 
• Although students will need to demonstrate verbal skills in future employment, presenting in a traditional format to a large audience is not necessarily something that all graduates will be required to do. Therefore, when using this form of assessment, ensure that it aligns with the course learning outcomes and consider whether more flexible forms of presenting could be used e.g., presenting to smaller groups or pre-recording presentations. 
• This form of assessment provides a snapshot of a student’s verbal ability at a specific time, therefore, as with other assessment types it does not necessarily evidence their subject knowledge or ability to apply this in other settings. 

Academic Integrity considerations

Low risk. Issues can include:  

• Presenters using pre-prepared texts created by external parties or peers. 

Mitigation options include: 

• Consider assessing the process as well as the presentation itself, especially if groupwork is involved.
• Require presenters to interact with the audience through tasks the presenters create and/or Q&A sessions. These may need guidance and scaffolding ahead of time, but enable presenters to display breadth of knowledge and to respond without relying on pre-prepared materials.
• Consider whether notes or audio/visual aids can be kept to the minimum.

Learn more about Academic Integrity training and support available to students and staff.

Digital solutions

Recommended Approaches:

• Any recordings should be saved to the University’s recommended storage areas (e.g. a Re:View (Panopto) assignment folder), not in personal storage spaces such as OneDrive.
  • Recommended workflows for Re:View (Panopto) summative and formative assessment.
• If carried out live in front of a small group, technology may not be needed. If carried out in a bigger group, audio visual equipment, such as a microphone or PowerPoint, may need to be incorporated. Staff may need to record presentations to provide evidence to external examiners. Recordings should be uploaded to a secure storage area (i.e., a Re:View (Panopto) assignment folder). 

Ease of use:

• Staff: Beginner 
• Students: Beginner

 Alternative technology options:

• Zoom or Teams can be used for live, but not in-person, presentations. 

Supporting the needs of all learners

Helpful considerations you can make as part of the design and delivery of this assessment include:  

• Support students to actively manage nerves associated with presenting in order to help them prepare for the final assessment and overcome barriers they may face. By encouraging students to think in terms of which specific aspects of presenting make them most anxious (e.g. remembering what they need to say, being in the spotlight, gaps in their knowledge), we can equip them to target specific aspects with which they are struggling.
• If students are new to, or particularly anxious about, presenting, consider whether they can present to a smaller audience or present in pairs/a small group in order to build confidence.
• Be clear about what you are assessing them on. For example, is it the content, style of delivery and/or their ability to engage the audience?

See further information about inclusive assessment strategies that you can embed.

Feedback opportunities

• Build in opportunities for students to practise presenting. Presentation skills can also be developed by supporting students to become comfortable hearing their voice in public, for example in teaching sessions. This is a skill they can develop over time in a way that is comfortable, sustainable and realistic.  
• Feedback can be provided via Moodle Assignment (students upload copy of presentation). 

Operational considerations

• QA16 Assessment, marking and feedback:
  • Presentations do not need to be marked anonymously. Orals/presentations that make a significant contribution to the final classification should be recorded as appropriate, and such assessments are subject to the same principles of internal and external moderation as written assessments (see QA16 section 11.9).

Further information and case-studies

• Blog; Can VR and AI Improve Soft Skills?