In recent years the taught masters course has become an even more important component of the curriculum portfolio for universities in the UK and elsewhere. In the spring of 2021, the Student Assessment and Classification Working Group (SACWG) surveyed a small number of English and Welsh universities to compare assessment regulations for taught…

We propose and test the proposition that innate personality differences in trait affect explain significant variance in student satisfaction. Using three standard measures of trait affect and data from a student sample (n = 409) of PhD candidates across science, social science and humanities in 63 universities from 20 countries, we find that 24%…

Student evaluations of teachers (SETs) are often used to evaluate teachers' performance in higher education. However, several factors unrelated to performance can lead to biased SETs. The present experimental research was designed to examine whether native or non-native teachers could be evaluated differently by students in higher education. In…

AI chatbots have recently fuelled debate regarding education practices in higher education institutions worldwide. Focusing on Generative AI and ChatGPT in particular, our study examines how AI chatbots impact university teachers' assessment practices, exploring teachers' perceptions about how ChatGPT performs in response to home examination…

Feedback seeking research envisages pro-active student roles in feedback processes but students seem to hesitate to seek feedback from their teachers despite the potential benefits it offers. Appreciating variation in students' experiences of feedback seeking is crucial for understanding this issue. This phenomenographic interview-based research…

Given the crucial role that teacher education programmes play in developing teacher-students' assessment literacy, this study investigates all the course syllabi (n = 278) in primary and secondary-school teacher education programmes offered by three universities in Norway. This study aimed at identifying: (1) the assessment patterns, (2) the…

Student evaluations of courses and teaching (SETs) are used for various purposes, are omnipresent in academic teaching, and cause tensions within universities. Their analytical power is contested, and specific uses are problematised for negative effects on lecturers and academic relationships. This interpretive interview study addresses how…

The integration of ChatGPT as a supplementary tool for writing instruction has gained traction. However, uncertainties persist regarding how ChatGPT complements teacher assessment and the overall effectiveness of this combined approach. To address this, we conducted a mixed-methods investigation involving 46 undergraduate students from a research…

Despite the benefits swift academic progress holds for many stakeholders, there is scarce literature on how academic progress may be improved by changes to assessment policies. Therefore, we investigated academic progress of first-year students after an alteration of characteristics of the assessment policies in three large course programmes:…

The aim of this article is to examine what characterises feedback regarding the group of students who receive the most comments compared to the rest of the students, all failing at least one task. Could it be that teachers comment differently on the most underperforming students? The empirical material consists of feedback handed out to students…

RateMyProfessors.com (RMP) is the most popular commercial website to evaluate instructors, and houses a wealth of student-generated information in the form of ratings and reviews. This study investigated whether general chemistry students who use RMP were different from other students, and their reasons to use and contribute to the site. A pool of…

One of the implicit aims of higher education is to enable students to become better judges of their own work. This paper examines whether students who voluntarily engage in self-assessment improve in their capacity to make those judgements. The study utilises data from a web-based marking system that provides students with the opportunity to…

RateMyProfessors.com (RMP) is becoming an increasingly popular tool among students, faculty and school administrators. The validity of RMP is a point of debate; many would argue that self-selection bias obscures the usefulness of RMP evaluations. In order to test this possibility, we collected three types of evaluations: RMP evaluations that…

This article analyses the student assessment procedures of 12 universities in the UK, the Netherlands and the Czech Republic with respect to their alignment with the European standards and guidelines on the quality of assessing higher education students (European Standards and Guidelines for Quality Assurance [ESG] 1.3). Based on qualitative…

This article outlines a methodology for characterising features of programme-level assessment environments so that the relationship between features of the assessment environment and students' learning response can be studied. The methodology was developed through the detailed case study of nine undergraduate degree programmes: one in each of…