Assessment is a notorious source of preoccupation for faculty and university governing bodies, especially when an institution initiates curricular reforms which shift the programme learning outcomes for knowledge to competencies. One obstacle to acceptance arises from a culture of quantitative assessment (often represented by a single mark), which…

Quality assurance is a major agenda in tertiary education. The casualisation of academic work, especially in teaching, is also a quality assurance issue. Casual or sessional staff members teach and assess more than 50% of all university courses in Australia, and yet the research in relation to the role sessional staff play in quality assurance of…

Changes in the nature of higher education are leading towards increased interest in the assessment of student learning. This study considers an attempt to apply value-added models for the purposes of comparing student learning across institutions, taking care to discuss special considerations inherent to the application of these models to higher…

Evidencing student achievement of standards is a growing imperative worldwide. Key stakeholders (including current and prospective students, government, regulators and employers) want confidence that threshold learning standards in an accounting degree have been assured. Australia's new higher education regulatory environment requires that student…

Value-added scores from tests of college learning indicate how score gains compare to those expected from students of similar entering academic ability. Unfortunately, the choice of value-added model can impact results, and this makes it difficult to determine which results to trust. The research presented here demonstrates how value-added models…

This study is the first to examine student performance differences between the major field test in business (MFTB) and the comprehensive business exam (CBE). Results reveal students performed at a statistically significant 50.8 percentile ranking on the CBE compared to a 38.0 percentile ranking on the MFTB. Additionally, this study finds that…

History courses at The University of Auckland are typically assessed at two or three moments during a semester. The methods used normally employ two essays and a written examination answering questions set by the lecturer. This study describes an assessment innovation in 2008 that expanded both the frequency and variety of activities completed by…

Programme evaluation is essential for quality assurance in education. In this paper, we describe our evaluation strategy for the first year of a new medical programme. Although we used multiple methods in the evaluation, the use of the focus group method was core. This paper reports our experiences of focus groups for this purpose. We describe the…

Today, a major goal in higher education is the advancement of students' vocational competences. To assess the extent to which this goal is met, both competences acquired during university studies and later vocational success need to be measured. In our study, we collected self-ratings of competences (t1) and indicators of vocational success (t2)…

The "Bases of Competence" model provides a general framework for learner-centred skill development and programme-focused outcomes assessment. Based on previous research, the "Bases of Competence" model describes 17 skills and four base competencies important to graduates to achieve high performance in the workplace. Taking this…

A good assessment method should be able to distinguish between deep learners and surface learners in a way so the former are rewarded while the later are punished. Using data of a survey conducted at the Institute of Contemporary Chinese Studies, University of Nottingham, the study finds strong evidence that assignment essays serve to reward deep…

Grading is one of the least liked, least understood and least considered aspects of teaching. After years of work, we have developed a grading system that is quite different from traditional and reformed approaches to grading and which meaningfully incorporates and integrates the collection of evidence, the evaluation of evidence, and the…

Discusses the notion of continuous quality measurement for outcomes assessment in higher education and describes a technology-based continuous quality measurement system (QMS) that has been developed and implemented at the University of Louisville. Discusses the role of QMS in the university's quality improvement scheme and its initial impacts on…

This study explores working students' college experiences using the grounded theory approach. Focus groups were conducted to allow working students to elaborate on their college experiences, clarifying issues not easily addressed through surveys. Two theoretical propositions are offered to describe how working students are constantly searching for…

"Engineering Criteria 2000" (EC 2000), the recently revised set of accreditation criteria for engineering programs in the USA, places considerable stress on outcomes assessments. EC 2000 requires the assessment results to be used to identify program improvements and for such usage and the resulting improvements to be documented. While…