Re-imagining Assessments
Some years ago, I conducted an outdoor leadership development program for 1st year undergraduates following a certain course of study in a well-regarded Sri Lankan public university. The program coordinator from the department wanted us to grade the students while on the program — we resisted because we knew that whatever observations we could make would at best be reflective of their capabilities prior to the program (you can’t learn leadership in 2 days, although you can learn about leadership) . If they were to be evaluated at all, it ought to be on how they made use of the concepts after the program. We settled on a compromise that we would grade their essays on what they had learned during the program and how they planned to make use of it.
When the essays came in, I was perplexed — the sentences barely made any sense, even though they seemed to indicate a vocabulary of someone far more proficient in expressing themselves. When I expressed my confusion to the coordinator, he said that the students had discovered a work-around for the university’s plagiarism checking software: they would take a friend’s essay, use Google to translate it to, say, Korean, and then translate it back to English and submit it. Of course, this double translation was the poor students’ modus operandi — the richer ones, especially when at the business end of their degree, could afford to hire assignment writing services to do the work on their behalf. And such services, which earlier had to operate in the shadows, now openly advertise their services.
Why are the students doing this? Don’t they know they are fooling themselves in the long run? That question only even makes sense if we assume students are in this game for the learning — when actually most just want a job (preferably a good job), and what they want from the university for that is the degree, because they believe that that certificate opens the door to the promised land.
Students who would struggle to pass under their own steam would be naive if they let this failing get in the way of their ambitions — so of course they do the bare minimum on non-GPA work, cram, cram, cram for the GPA exams and cheat on their assignments.
Knowing all this, we could try to invent new ways to prevent plagiarism — but students will continue to innovate ways to bypass them. Or we could wake up, smell the hydnora africana, and acknowledge that the smell is from a grading system being so tainted that any employer worth their salt would not accept it at face value — we’ve even had clients tell us they prefer not to hire First Class graduates, because mostly they were good at “book knowledge” but weak in actually putting things into practice, and moreover tended to be loners who didn’t know how to work in a team (the majority of education is assessed on how students perform individually, and then when they go to work they are magically expected to perform in teams 🤷🏾♂️)
Do we have an alternative? Yes. Tertiary Education should decide the approach based on the motive of the students:
- In University, i.e. for those who want a career in research:
Make research the primary vehicle of evidence (so, increase research work and reduce or eliminate exams and assignments). Of course they could still fake it by outsourcing the writing and maybe even the research work itself — but then they’d have to continue to do the same in their work, and that gets expensive very quickly; moreover if their employer can’t detect that they are faking the research, perhaps they deserve to be deceived this way 🤷🏾♂️ - In Vocational Education (or their glorified cousins — universities), i.e. for those who want commercial employment (job or entrepreneur):
What they need is to demonstrate their ability to practically apply their knowledge, so the portfolio of their past work becomes the primary vehicle of evidence (and, again, reduce or eliminate exams and assignments). The portfolio would mainly comprise hands-on work (e.g. internships, gig-work) for real needs as expressed by prospective employers (if there are no prospective employers, we should reconsider the relevance of offering the program for this audience), but would also include student-initiated passion projects — if nothing else, these would help students showcase evidence of their transversal skills, which are also in demand by employers.
Students intending to be entrepreneurs should have a startup (or several) in their portfolio. If they go on to be an entrepreneur, the skills learned here will remain useful. If they don’t, it would still be possible to market themselves as an intrapreneur. - For those who have no employment ambitions:
There’s no need to assess them — they don’t need a grade at all. Just let them learn what they are interested in learning, to the extent that they want to. However, even for them, a portfolio (could be exclusively passion projects) will guide them in understanding what they have learned, and help identify what they would like to learn about next.
And if some students want to take it easy and do easy-work to fill up their portfolio , while others take on challenging stretch assignments — so be it, that is their work ethic, it will show in their work, and employers can decide who they want to employ and at what price-point.
Could students still cheat? For the documentation part of the portfolio, possibly. For actually doing the work — it’s much harder to find a proxy, a lot more expensive, and more easily caught out at an interview or while on probation.
Tertiary institutions would be relieved of the burden of setting exams, invigilating them, preventing plagiarism, and marking papers. Instead they would devote that effort to mentoring students on how to have richer achievements (harder challenges requiring deep knowledge and/or complex challenges that require competence in multiple dimensions) in their portfolio as well as guiding them towards the resources (courses, books, research, project mentors, etc) needed to succeed in them. This would have an additional benefit of ensuring that what students learn are a close match to what the job market requires of them.
This would also put paid to elite universities’ ability to charge a premium for the credentialing that they offer — but they can easily pivot: students going to elite universities would (or, at least, should) be exposed to a richer learning environment (because of what the university is able to offer that their poorer cousins cannot) and that will show in the work in their portfolio, and that’s how they justify a price premium. But the real winners will be the universities who build in good validation mechanisms into their portfolio processes so prospective employers can make their short-listing decisions easily.
If you think this won’t work, let us remember that this is exactly what we do for lawyers, architects, doctors and even photographers and tattoo artists. We look at their track record rather than their academic transcripts when we select them. And their career paths (at least in the disciplines that have evolved a system of licensing) are structured to support that — they commence work as under-studies to seniors who assess whether the quality of their work under real life situations are up to the mark before they are allowed to obtain a license from the regulating authority to practice their craft by themselves. All I am suggesting is to extend this to other disciplines and start that real-world work earlier.
This could even be extended to schools (differentiated for those who would proceed with university/vocational studies and those who intend to start working) except that while we can accept individual organizations being subjective in their recruitment, it’s harder to accept that publicly funded tertiary education would not use an objective measure; so we would probably need to have exams at least for those intending to pursue higher studies, although we could still use the internship and gig work model for the rest.
This transformation will take a lot of time and effort for students (how to demonstrate their work in a portfolio?), teaching staff (how to mentor students? how to align teaching with real-world needs?) and employers (how to provide good work opportunities? how to assess portfolios in recruitment?) to adjust. But surely that is better than the easy choice of retaining the expensive and pointless status quo?
You may also be interested in my other writing on Education, Politics/Power, Ethics/Philosophy/Humanism, Parenting and “Lost in Translation”
