When we present students with unfamiliar assessment formats, it can be difficult for them to work out what is expected of them and more difficult on occasions for them to recognise what kind of work is good enough to match required standards. If we are able to show rather than just tell them what we are looking for, they are more likely to achieve higher standards. Exemplars are a well-established means of helping students get the hang of new-to-them assessment genres and can save a lot of anguish on both sides.

Students, especially those from diverse cultural backgrounds, often find the first assignment on a course really challenging, particularly if they are ‘first in family’ to go to university and may therefore have a limited understanding of what is likely to be expected of them. It therefore pays dividends if staff put resources and energy into helping students get to know the rules of the game. Students may be able to successfully manage the unfamiliarity of new learning contexts and classroom environments that are very different to what they have experienced before. However, they can’t avoid the need to be successful in assessment if they are to progress. It’s part of our job therefore to help students overcome any uneasiness, and the best way to do this is to demystify the process and give them stress-free opportunities to practice the competencies they eventually need to demonstrate to meet the learning outcomes

Many authors (including Nicol, 2010 and Carless, 2013) suggest that good feedback should always be a dialogue, not a monologue from tutors. Students can become very good at self-assessing their work, but usually don’t have the opportunity to fine-tune their self-assessment and need feedback to help them on their way. If we just ask: ‘try to work out what your mark or grade is?’ they’re likelyvto just guess, and then probably forget what they guessed. While some students might select a grade close to that which you gave them, studies show that ‘high achievers’ underestimate their abilities and the majority of under-achievers will overestimate their mark. Research shows (Clouder, Broughan, Jewell & Steventon, 2012) that this trend is retained across different nationalities but interestingly, students form different nationalities can also have different perspectives of their abilities. Therefore, we need to educate students about making assessment judgements against well-expressed criteria, just as we try to do when we assess their work.

When they are clearly focused, well-crafted essay topics allow students to demonstrate how well they can access and manage information in meaningful ways” (Morgan, Dunn, Parry, & O’Reilly, 2004, p. 111) but many argue that writing essays isn’t the best preparation for functioning effectively in the 21st century, when oral presentation and working well with others may be more important considerations. However, others argue that essays can allow students to show their creativity and skills at writing an argument or making a case. Whichever is the case, there are five main problems with the over-use of essays as an assessment device: • They take a great deal of time to mark, let alone the time it takes for students to prepare, draft and compose them. • When most assessment is in the form of essays, students’ skills at essay-writing are repeatedly tested, at the expense sometimes of their understanding of the subject. • Lots of research shows that we’re not at all good at marking essays fairly – different assessors often give the same essay very different marks. • Essay marks often tend to lie between 35% for a poor one and 75% for a very good one, whereas in many other disciplines the marks for an assignment like a lab report can range across the whole 0-100% span more evenly. • With coursework essays, there can be doubt about veracity – i.e. whodunit?! (Race, 2014) Of course, essay questions in exams largely get over the last of the above problems but assessing them often relies heavily on how effective students are at writing legibly and fast, which can have little to do with their grasp of the subject matter.

We are often keen to encourage students to submit assignments in advance of their final submissions, but we need to be able to do this efficiently and effectively, since few of us have the time to provide detailed comments on drafts provided by lots of our students. The ideas set out here are designed to illustrate how we can help our students to improve their work-in-progress without making unfeasible amounts of work for the hard-pressed markers

Assessors complain that they spend hours devising and delivering good feedback via comments on assessed work, in class, in studio critiques, on the Virtual Learning Environment (VLE), in one-to-ones and in tutorials, only to find that students seem to either ignore the formative comments or complain they never get any feedback. If students ignore or trivialise our feedback, it cannot help them however detailed and supportive it is. Students’ failure to engage with feedback not only is unhelpful to them and frustrating for us, but also impacts negatively on Irish Survey of Student Engagement (ISSE) scores.