Continuous assessment

Continuous Assessment is the educational policy in which students are examined continuously over most of the duration of their education, the results of which are taken into account after leaving school. It is often proposed or used as an alternative to a final examination system.

Types

There are several types of continuous assessment including daily class work, course related projects and papers, and practical work.

Continuous Assessment is the educational policy in which students are examined continuously over most of the duration of their education, the results of which are taken into account after leaving school. It is often proposed or used as an alternative to a final examination system. Continuous assessment is used to calculate the marks for every type of work in college viz. test marks, home work, term paper marks, etc. Final marks are always given on the best of all tests basis. Continuous assessment is used to mainly calculate the TGPA and the CGP. Continuous Assessment consists of assessments and evaluations that take place over a period of time. In other words, you will be assessed right through your learning process and not only after the learning process. Through continuous assessment one can track the improvement (if any) of the learner, be able to give more support, guidance, and more opportunities to improve.

Characteristics

• Comprehensive
• Cumulative
• Diagnostic
• Formative
• Guidance-oriented
• Systematic in nature

Advantage

Continuous assessment can provide early indicators on the performance of students. It is often used by both students and faculty. It can also provide what has been learned by a particular stage.

Advantages & Disadvantages of Formative Assessment

Formative assessment covers the range of informal diagnostic tests a teacher can use to assist the process of learning by his students. Prescriptive but ungraded feedback enables students to reflect on what they are learning and why. The goal is to improve performance and achieve successful outcomes. Robert Stake, Director of the Center for Instructional Research and Curriculum Evaluation, likens formative assessment to a cook tasting a soup before serving it to a guest. Despite its advantages, formative assessment can be time-consuming, and incentives in the school system tend to favor more objective assessments.

Its main advantages are: Continuous Improvement o One great advantage of formative assessment for learning is that it is ongoing. This allows for incremental feedback to identify problems at their earliest stages. For example, a student can correct conceptual errors before undertaking work on a term paper. As that student works on the term paper, input from the teacher can inform, guide and validate each step of the writing process. Honesty o Cheating and plagiarism remain significant problems in academic settings. A study on academic dishonesty published in the Electronic Journal of Sociology in 2003 found that 83 percent of the students surveyed admitted to cheating more than once. Compared to graded summative assessments like final exams, ungraded formative assessments reduce the temptation to cheat. This allows students to focus on learning instead of grades.

The main disadvantages of Formative Assessment are: Labor Intensive o Although offering many benefits, effective formative assessment can be difficult to achieve at scale. It may be logistically impossible to provide detailed descriptive feedback for each student in a large class. Even with a smaller number of students to deal with, formative assessment is time-consuming as it requires significant, ongoing dedication and effort from the teacher to sustain. This is especially true when combined with the summative assessments teachers are required to complete. Accountability o The layered accountability chain in education—student to teacher, teacher to school, school to district, etc. creates systemic pressure for student performance to be objectively and comparatively measurable at each level. Formative assessment, by definition, doesn't easily provide that kind of accountability. This explains why, although the advantages of formative assessment have been repeatedly articulated since the distinction between it and summative assessment was first made in 1967, empirical studies continue to show that very few teachers consistently make use of it in actual practice.

How Continuous Assessments Help Students Learn

Continuous assessment can help students learn in the following 6 ways -

1. An increased sense of inclusiveness. Continuous assessment provides students with a constant stream of opportunities to prove their mastery of material and sends the message that everyone can succeed if given enough time and practice. This reduces the anxiety and finality around testing and heightens the emphasis on the learning itself. When mastery instead of competition with other students becomes the point of assessment, the focus shifts from superficial competition to true understanding and personal learning goals.
2. Higher learning standards for all. In a system of continuous assessment, advanced students can progress through material at their own pace and remain engaged by pursuing more challenging work as they pass out of the basics. In this sense, the standards for such students stretch to help each student maximize potential. Because success is defined on an absolute and individualized basis, students cannot be satisfied with their achievements relative to others; they are encouraged to seek their own course and take responsibility for their learning.
3. Clarified purpose of assessment. The problem with administering assessments only once in a while is that the primary aim is to compare students while at the same time allowing them to “pass” to the next level. This produces a situation in which the purpose of assessment is muddled: the tendency is to let students level up (because, regardless of standards, everyone is generally expected to pass) although they may not truly grasp the material or have a very weak understanding of it. For this reason, students may start the next level at a weaker state with no opportunity to correct their misunderstandings.
4. Capacity to provide remedies for weaknesses through strengths. When we, as Christensen suggests, begin measuring the length of time it takes to master a concept or skill and contrast the efficacy of different approaches, we are able to gather data about the learning process and put this knowledge to work for students: “Because learning will no longer be as variable, we can compare students not by what percentage of the material they have mastered, but by comparing how far they have moved through a body of material.” This sort of data solves another problem: the self-perpetuating cycle through which the curriculum and methods of instruction for various subjects are tailored for those who are gifted in them. Math classes, for instance, are taught by those who are gifted at math and through texts written by those who are gifted in the subject as well; and class itself is shaped by the questions and comments of gifted math students. (This leaves those who are not gifted at math feeling excluded and turns them off from the subject.) Imagine an alternative: the confidence students develop in the areas in which they excel helps them learn subjects for which they have less proclivity. And better yet, strategies that have been proven effective for students with specific weaknesses can be used to help other students with those weaknesses. Envision a system that places a student on a proven effective learning path once he displays a learning style and proficiency level that is similar to another student in a network.
5. Increased self-awareness for students who, through continuous assessment, come to understand their proficiency and knowledge gaps. Time and again, we encounter evidence that self-awareness — understanding of how one feels, thinks, and learns — is one of the most significant factors in professional and personal success. The famous psychologist, Gardner argues that self-knowledge — “intra-personal skill” — is one of the eight defining types of intelligence (the others being “linguistic,” “logical-mathematical,” “naturalist,” “bodily-kinesthetic,” “spatial,” “musical,” and “interpersonal”). The more continuously we assess students, the more knowledge they can gain about themselves — what it takes for them to master something, how they can approach problems differently, what their blind spots are, and how to eliminate them.
6. Capacity to uncover interdisciplinary relationships between subject domains and concepts. Continuous assessment allows us to refine our understanding of the content that we are teaching students. We might discover that effective remediation in a subject requires attention to another subject or that the root of common misunderstandings within a subject is something altogether unexpected.

See also

• Educational assessment