I have long had an interest in varying forms of assessment, besides or instead of the conventional types of essays and unseen exams; I’ve experimented at various times with journals, blogs, different sorts of research tasks, online engagement, Wikipedia editing, group projects and probably a few other things. I think more or less all the stuff I’ve written on this has disappeared, with the demise of the various resource sites or organisations who published them (at any rate I’ve given up trying to update the URLs; tl;dr, students are generally massively resistant to anything new as they don’t know how to do well…), but I can demonstrate their past existence. All of this is of course intended to establish my credentials as thoughtful, innovative and even radical in this area – because suddenly I am confronted with something that makes me feel oddly reactionary and resistant: the idea that students should be offered a choice of forms of assessment.
What’s the problem? The colleagues who are promoting this approach might justifiably ask me this question not just in general terms, but specifically in relation to the fact that in both my final-year seminars I offer students a… choice of forms of assessment when it comes to the ‘class presentation’ element. Indeed, at various points this year I have celebrated their innovations: exploring key episodes in Thucydides through podcast episodes, or a choose-your-own-adventure game on foreign policy decisions, or a draft film script of the Pylos and Sphacteria episode. Even with the more conventional ‘here is some assorted information and points for discussion’ approach, encouraging students to record their presentation in advance and then handling questions in class not only seems preferable for those who get really nervous about speaking up but also is a much better use of class time. Scope for innovation and creativity, flexibility to accommodate student learning needs – what’s not to like?
Well. There are two key things that these assessments have in common, which make it easy to accommodate lots of variety of form: the core aim and key criterion of assessment is simply to get discussion going, and the exercise constitutes a small part of the overall module mark. If the activity was also supposed to emphasise the depth of knowledge and understanding, or the level of engagement with modern scholarship, I would be much more worried about the extent to which that might not be possible or even appropriate for certain forms – no one wants a film script with footnotes, so presumably in such a case the student would need to provide a separate, more conventional academic piece to explain and justify all their choices, demonstrate their specialist knowledge etc. Put another way, the ‘presentation’ in whatever form is a means to an end, student discussion in class, and I can focus on its success in provoking the latter (making due allowance for unresponsive students; I can have a pretty clear sense that a given exercise ought to have got them talking, even if they don’t…).
And if the assessment in question was the main or only determinant of the overall module mark, I would be really worried about its ability to test all the different learning outcomes (and of demonstrating this to other people, e.g. external examiners), and about the risks of the choice of some forms more or less setting up the student to fail, and the increasing difficulties of comparison to ensure that students are all being assessed according to the same criteria. It’s always bothered me a little that traditional class presentations may tend to favour students who are confident and glib and are great mates with others in the class, which are not the qualities we are aiming to develop or reward; I do tend to adjust my emphasis slightly in marking, to expect better content from those who don’t need to sweat the presentation aspect, and to give credit to those who clearly hate it if they can manage an effective even if not eloquent presentation of material. Allowing pre-recording or other forms is great for precisely this reason. But the risk of, say, replacing core essays with creative exercises is that one ends up advantaging those who just happen to be creative types, who can produce something that is objectively much better with respect to the form; we are used to evaluating essays with an eye to such issues – not letting someone’s sophisticated writing style distract from deficiencies in the content and argument – but I fear we, or at least I, am less practised in doing this for less familiar forms, but also the more emphasis on the creative aspect as the aim of the exercise, the less one should be discounting this…
Of course, the answer may be that this is my problem: I need to improve my skills and understanding of assessing such things, in order to do the students’ work justice. That does make this a riskier enterprise for the students, if only because my ability to offer them advice and support will be limited until I get a bit more experience – I’m likely to offer lots of warnings and caveats, alive to the potential drawbacks and pitfalls rather than to the opportunities, because this is a big gamble (whereas for the presentations, contributing just 10% of the module mark, I can be unhesitatingly enthusiastic and encouraging).
Although, realistically, I’m not sure how many students would take up such an option in the first place, unless the default possibility of a conventional essay was excluded altogether. Maybe it’s just ancient history students, but if they are unkeen on book reviews or research reports rather than essays, where the relation to the actual skills and knowledge they should already have acquired is easily explained, how keen will they be on something more creative? My experience is that they are generally risk averse even with the choice of essay questions (in any given year, more than half will choose one of the boring sample questions from the module handbook rather than talking with me about the development of a suitable question based on their own interests). Cynically, I could introduce the possibility of choice into my modules, to maintain a reputation for openness to innovation, in the firm expectation that students will rarely if ever choose this in practice…
Sphinx 
When this topic comes up I always remember a meeting where colleagues at another university introduced their photographic assignment (in Criminology). How did they weight the visual component? “Well, you know they say a picture’s worth a thousand words… so we ask for two images and a 1000-word text, and we reckon that’s equivalent to a standard essay.” People perked up all around the room – you could feel them thinking, we could do that!, and thinking how much easier and more fun it would be to mark. But it’s nonsense really – you’d just end up looking at the pictures for a minute or two and then having 1000 words to mark instead of 3,000.
It always seems to mean less, is my cynical observation – less preparation time, less marking time, less effort for them, less effort for us. Which is a win-win, superficially, but experience also teaches (and workerist Marxism agrees) that saving time on a task is only a temporary gain, because that time doesn’t remain yours for very long. The direction of travel is always towards spending more time delivering lower-quality teaching to more students.
Interesting – my experience of new approaches to assessment is that they almost invariably involve MORE work, not necessarily for the students (except insofar as they have to think more than they would with familiar essays and unseen exams) but definitely for staff, both in providing support and advice and then in the marking process.
Arguments about saving time of assessment, usually from higher authority who wanted to reduce the number of staff needed to deliver programmes, usually focused either on misinterpretation of an educational study that showed you only needed a few summative assessments to fix a student’s likely final degree (as if that was the only point of assessment) or on peer assessment, which was the one thing guaranteed to make students feel better about other changes…