Assessment: a necessary evil?

Hello. I have just signed up for this course so now playing ‘catch up’ by reading through the Forum posts and the recommended texts. Interesting and inspiring.

And quite a relief!

Why? Well, the syllabus format of the LCL course is something I have been implementing for some time in my university undergraduate course (entitled Media Architecture Communication). The students are expected to create an image of their futures based upon specific themes; so far topics have included house 2030, energy 2050, computer 2050, employment 2050. The technology use has included Scratch, SketchUp, iMovie, OpenSim. I am happy with the way the syllabus evolves over the 15 weeks, and the project outcomes are mostly quite creative. The student feedback (n=80) is mostly positive with, roughly speaking, 85% of the feedback being supportive. Though there are those 15% negative comments.

I now wish to implement this ‘creative’ approach in the other Communication classes by other academic colleagues. The issues though are specifically ‘learning outcomes’ and ‘assessment’.
How does one pass or fail a student?
Is it fair to let the enthusiastic, tech-capable, creative students do ‘most of the work’ while some students hide from their responsibilities as learners and team participants?
What constitutes a grade A –B –C ?
What are the specific ‘learning objectives’ and how do I know my students have acquired them?
Although I feel I am developing a creative course, I still have to work within a traditional education framework with often traditionally thinking academics.
The questions asked of me are valid and the challenge is to provide convincing answers.

I am currently framing my assessment criteria and learning objectives based upon Anderson et al.’s revised Bloom’s Taxonomy [1], and offering rubrics as a means of ‘scoring’ students’ work.

My question to the community here is: If your course leader and university administrators required, how would you assess (evaluate, score, grade) 40 individual students on this LCL course?

Reference
[1] L. W. Anderson, D.R. Krathwohl, P. W. Airasian, K. A. Cruicshank, R. E. Mayer, P. R. Pintrich, J. Raths, J. and M. C. Wittrock. A taxonomy for learning, teaching and assessing: A revision of Bloom’s taxonomy of educational objectives. New York, Longman, 2001.

Ah, I wish I could plus in people who haven't enrolled in this course... I'd love to get their input. I posted about this thread over on G+... so maybe they'll jump in (link.)

I think that ideally, this would be answered based on the overall learning objectives of the students in question. In other words: why are they in school? What are they looking to accomplish? The answers will certainly differ between students, though the answers might well fall into a few standard categories.

Perhaps different students should be judged along different metrics, though that should also be represented in the resulting credential, portfolio, or recommendations they end up with. That's one of many reasons to go beyond letter grades and GPAs, but the question remains, what should replace them.

That's one of the toughest questions with courses that involve creativity. A closely related one is, how many credit hours should a given student get? Some of your students may be trying to scrape by with minimal work to pass and get their credits toward graduation. Some may put in a lot more work, and demonstrate a lot more ability, knowledge, and learning. Maybe, instead of fixing credit hours for a course, and varying the grades people are given, credit hours could also be assigned in a flexible manner?

That gives rise to the question of rubrics, and where credits and/or grades would follow from specific activities or methods of evaluation. And, it gives rise to the question of different forms of degrees or credentials, depending on what a given student is willing to do, and what they're looking to demonstrate to employers, clients, friends and family, or future educational institutions.

And that's one big conversation!

Thoughts on that?

Thank you for your responses. We are currently looking at portfolios for both computer science and design courses. As academics we see much value in students developing portfolios from day 1 of their undergraduate studies. The more ‘enlightened’ companies also see value in students demonstrating their portfolios during job-hunting as they near the end of their 4 year study with us. The more enthusiastic students will develop, over time, a wonderful portfolio of their studies and reflections of their experiences. Some do not and these portfolios are, generally speaking, quite indicative of their capabilities as computer science or design undergraduates.
At present though the portfolios are not formally evaluated and certainly not assigned a grade.
Trying to make portfolios a high stakes assessment exercise in some ways makes sense (particularly for design students) but traditional educational expectations (the culture of higher education, validity of scores, reliability across disciplines) present major hurdles. At the classroom / subject level we can certainly expect students to create a subject portfolio of work with evaluation descriptors to begin the transition to something better than A – B – C grading.
If we are advocating constructionism as practice then I personally believe if we can solve the assessment conundrum, we can convince more academics and the reluctant students (i.e. those who expect a traditional, didactic education experience).