Month: January 2015

The tricky business of assessment

The tutorials that I gave last week to first year biochemistry students have prompted me to think about assessment – and fairness.

The task for the tutorial, which is given on the Biological Chemistry course run by Prof Drickamer was pretty straight-forward. The students first had to attempt a four-part question taken from a previous exam that covers some core elements of amino acid chemistry and polypeptides structure. But the second part was more interesting: having tackled the question themselves, the students then had to mark the answers given to the same question by three former students. In the actual exam, staff had graded these three answers with scores of 45%, 65% and 88%.