Assessment assessment

Assessment assessment - part 1 May 4, 2005

Posted by Andy Roberts in : ultraversity, learning , trackback

I handed in a piece of university work recently, a substantial report representing over 200 hours work on a research project which I was interested in and went well.

Here’s a link to it
ultrastudents/andyroberts/year2/AEreport/AEtool.html

And here is a link to the assessment which I received back from my learning facilitator.

ultrastudents/andyroberts/year2/AEreport/mark.html

Since there are a number of direct questions asked in the assesment, and there is no obvious place where I am supposed to reply, I am going to use the blog for this purpose, in a series of articles which examine the assessment cover sheet and attempt to answer it.

degree title suffix

In this first part, I wish to deal with the optional degree title suffix.

Ultraversity offer to all students, the chance to add a suffix to the basic degree title “BA(hons) Learning, Technology, Research” although nearly all are dissuaded from doing so. I decided that it would be beneficial to attempt to incorporate my own speciality, Information Communication Technology (ICT) into the degree title and was sucessfully helped through the process to do so in year one last year. There will be another process to make sure I am still working towards the chosen degree title later this year, I am told, which seems fair enough.

But the thing which bothers me, is that the software which runs the Ultraversity stuff, and all of the pro-formas are never personalised for my own case. If I thought it was just an erroneous heading on a page then I could put up with that but whenever I query it I get given the same blank answer “your degree title will be reassessed at the end of the second year”, which is true as I have already explained, but it doesn’t answer my concerns at all.

My concerns are that the chosen degree title, and therefore the focus of my research, is simply never referred to anywhere, and I am extremely suspicious that it is simply forgotten about, even when my work is being assessed and advice given for future directions. This is important to me, because having an amended degree title means that I am not always trying to do the same type of work in the same proportions as other students who are doing the basic degree title, and yet my work is compared and assessed, apparently, as if it were. I would have thought that specialising in the technology aspect should at least mean that some effort is made by assessors to understand the technology I am researching and writing about, but it seems to be my writing style and skill at essay writing which attracts all of the analysis while the actual work I do and research barely gets a mention. If anything I feel as if I am being discouraged from pursuing the very thing which I was offered the chance to specialise in.

Why doesn’t the amended degree title appear in the feedback so that I can be sure it has been considered and not forgotten about?

The amended degree title is the one I am aiming to graduate in, but it is the incorrect unamended one which always appears in the titles, and this applies to all of the ultraversity tools, such as they are.

So I’ve begun by raising the question of the degree title then, to begin with. Future entries in this series will discuss selected parts of the substance of the assessment.

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