Stories for you by you!

Okay this is it... stories I found interesting from the "Fundamentals of Assessment"Online Course. The first story is from Mark from DMIT.

"When I was teaching back in Ngee Ann (again teaching programming). We came up with an interesting idea.What we did for one module, was to write a workbook, full of programming questions. Students would have to work though the book in practicals, during their classes and them show the tutors, their working programs. I seem to remeber that they have also had to submit source code hard copy for us to look at. It was a good idea, but generally flawed in its execution. Imagine having to spent your practical classes just going from student to student to see their work. And then having to look at all the students code as well (this was ~20 programs per student, ~40 pages each). It just ate all our time.We also were looking at a lot of suspisiously similar code all the time.For my current programming module we are running weekly tests from weeks 2-6. They are conducted during a session when the students all have practicals at the same time (thats easy as its only two classes). Its done on blackboard, 5 MCQ's, one 'write a program' (usually <10>

This is from Dioni from CASS... Captains from SMA, can verify that the test is FIXED?!!!!

"I took my PPCDL licence some years back at SMA at SP. It was a computer-based test. The PC generates some 30 MCQ questions randomly from a database of 500 (thts wht i was told, though i very much suspect its much much more) of that one has to answer. Your result is instantly printed once you hit the final submit button and shows only a 'Pass' or 'Fail' indicating the total points scored. But it does not tell you which are the questions you got wrong (or right). Most people who took the test can't help but think that the test is devised as such for unscrupulous commercial purposes. I later found out that many other tests offered by training centres often linked to stat boards adpoted the same practice. tsk tsk tsk... "

And for the last story....

This is from Althea and this is what I am talking about when I say we need to design good rubrics but then again....

"This is not a personal story. However, being a ex-facilitator from Republic Poly, I used to get alot of feedback from the students on the method of assessment there. As the method of instruction is PBL, students are graded on each lesson based on the facilitator's obesrvation of the students throughout the day. In this respect, grading can be rather subjective. It is entirely possible that a student can do exactly the same thing during a lesson but be given 2 different grades if he were to be oberved by 2 different facilitators. It is also hard on the facilitators because you have to make a mental note of what each of the 25 students does during the day. "