The Administrative Assessment Process

The administrative assessment process helps campus departments identify and improve critical functions, services and projects in support of the university’s strategic direction. It involves developing meaningful outcomes, measuring those outcomes, examining results in relation to targets and planning for continuous improvement.

Test administrators are expected to demonstrate honesty, integrity, due care and fairness in their administration of assessments. This requires training, standardized testing procedures and clear policies.

Assessment Process

The assessment process involves the development of goals and objectives connected to curriculum, determining measures and benchmarks, evaluating outcomes and improving practices.

Assessment should be a positive experience for students. It should enable them to identify their strengths and weaknesses with respect to course learning outcomes, provide feedback on their performance, demonstrate & celebrate successes and allow them to direct their own progress.

Whether it’s a daily informal assessment such as observation or a formal, standardized test, it should be designed to gather academic information for critical decisions about student learning. It should be aligned with the established goals and objectives of the program, and it should provide reliable and valid results.

The assessment process also includes establishing the scope of an assessment, developing the assessment tools and administering it. Once the assessment is complete, it must be interpreted and the decision must be made. The program must then close the loop and make any necessary changes to its assessment practices.

Assessment Tools

Assessment tools are systematic and standardized instruments for evaluating and measuring specific attributes, skills, and competencies in a consistent and objective way. They help to eliminate subjective biases and personal preferences in the hiring process, while also facilitating talent development.

These assessment tools include questionnaires, tests, interviews, and job simulations. They can be formal or informal. An informal assessment is an inference that an educator makes as a result of unsystematic observations of students’ performance. Formal assessments are more structured and use testing methods that have been scientifically validated to provide reliable, valid results.

A good assessment tool should be designed for the context of the use case. For example, a questionnaire should have question types that suit the needs of the survey. For instance, a tool like Formplus has a variety of question types that can collect qualitative and quantitative data. It also supports a wide range of field types like text input, drop-down menu, numerical slider, ranking, opinion scale, date/time picker, and more.

Assessment Criteria

A criterion is a clear and transparent expression of the requirements against which students’ performance on an assessment task will be assessed. Criteria are derived directly from the learning outcomes and help you as lecturer to assess students’ work openly, fairly and clearly.

For example, a criteria for a lab report might include displaying data correctly, writing in an appropriate tone and using correct formatting. This is because you want to ensure that students can complete the assessment at a basic level and are not overloaded with too much detail, which could impact on their mark.

The criteria you define for your assessment will be used to assign a grade or mark. It’s important that you share the assessment criteria with your students to make it as clear as possible for them to understand what is required of them and to enable you to easily justify how marks are awarded. The criteria should also be aligned with the learning outcomes that you have defined for your course or program.

Assessment Reports

Assessment reports provide data and analysis on the performance of learners against the assessment criteria. These reports are available at the district, school site, department, teacher, course (or a course for a specific teacher), and class period levels. Assessment reports can also be analyzed by question or standard group and include graphs of student and question performance.

The Student Assessment Report (also known as the Item Performance Summary) displays student score and performance level data, as well as metric data for individual assessment items. This data is based on applicable grade settings for the assessment, and includes any override scores submitted by students.

The Team Assessment Report identifies the strengths and weaknesses of your service team and provides you with recommendations to address them. These recommendations are derived from the results of an internal assessment and external benchmarks, where applicable. Each recommendation is accompanied by a plan of action that is intended to help the team implement the recommended change and achieve sustainable improvements.