The subject knowledge students learn during their degree is essential, but supporting students to develop the skills, literacies, and attributes to apply that knowledge, navigate and succeed in uncertainty, and become thought leaders are also essential key university activities. It is crucial that students develop the competencies, skills, and adaptability that help them to become career-ready professionals who engage in lifelong learning.

Assessment practices play a key role in the realisation of these outcomes for students. However, student satisfaction with assessment remains a critical challenge for the HE sector. Recently, this has been confounded by the explosion of AI tools, many of which are freely accessible, that can quickly, and quite well, generate original text drawing from a wealth of online information. For some students, this is an exciting opportunity to increase their learning and develop new skills. For others, sadly, it is a way to circumvent academic integrity checks and cheat the system. As a silver lining, as it is always good to look at the positives, we may see the end of ‘essay mills’. This challenge is refocusing the conversation on meaningful, holistic assessment practices.

Meaningful assessment encourages the academic focus to shift solely from the module assessment output to the module and programme assessment journey, including any final assessment output. Here, the student’s growth in their personal learning journeys is centralised around programme-level outcomes and competencies distributed through modular design. This can be enhanced further by propelling learner agency. Students who have ownership and control over their learning have a growth mindset and will experience more learning gains.

Join this webinar to discover how a programme-focused approach to assessment in combination with learner agency can offer a solution for universities rethinking their assessment practices.