The Season of Stress: Lets Remove Assessments "Of" Learning!

     T'is the season to be stressed! For all university students, the end of October and beginning of November symbolize a very busy midterm season.  With five full courses many students can experience writing up to ten midterms (two per class) along with five final exams.  These assessments "of" learning place much fear and anxiety among students as they tend to hinder one's grade average.  Perhaps university life would not be so stressful if our assessments "of" learning were not weighted so high; after four years of experience it becomes clear that the higher the weighting, the more your mark seems to decrease.  Perhaps it would be most beneficial, for both teacher and student, if assessments "of" learning were removed from a class syllabus.  This removal would save teachers from spending numerous hours on marking, and in turn, students would be able to enjoy their post-secondary education stress free.

     As a fourth year student, I believe that students have higher chances of succeeding and receiving the grades they want through assessments "for" learning.  Such assessments allow students to write journals, complete research papers, and/or create collaborative presentations.  Students tend to experience more success through this method of assessment as they are provided with structured choice.  Students are allowed to choose research topics of choice, and are provided with opportunities to create unique presentation lay-outs/ lesson plans.  Students are also given lots of preparation time in comparison to assessments "of" learning as midterms and final examinations all have very short time limits.  From previous experience, it becomes very difficult to create and share ideas in such short time spans.  It also becomes very difficult to write down thoughts in pressured time; many students state that they "ran out of time" and therefore, were not able to write down all of the information that they knew.  

     Throughout the concurrent education program I have been told numerous times that assessment "of" learning does not truly show what a student has learned.  In most cases test averages are low, which indicates that students did not "take in" all of the information their professor has presented them.  With this in mind, I find it very ironic that many of my fourth year courses are utilizing assessments "of" learning.  I was hoping that we, the class of 2016, would have been presented with more assessments "for" and "as" learning; I feel that all syllabus' should reflect the same marking scheme as Professor Drake's.  This particular course is the ONLY education course that is effectively following the guidelines of the pedagogy it is teaching!  Dr. Drake has provided her students with numerous opportunities to learn, explore and make mistakes.  She has also given us the tools to control our own learning by allowing us to create our own unit plans (something we will have to do for our future teaching careers).

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References

Drake, S. M., Reid, J. L., Kolohon, W. (2013). Interweaving curriculum and classroom

assessment. Don Mills, ON: Oxford University Press