Level 4: Course – Examiner

The assessment should follow the principle of constructive alignment and should meet the quality criteria of validity, transparency and reliability.

When designing your course and the assessment, you should adhere to Constructive Alignment, the principle that there is a direct relation between the Intended Learning Outcomes (ILOs) of a course (what students should learn), the Teaching and Learning Activities (what the teacher and the students do to learn this) and the Assessment (the check whether the students have achieved the ILOs of the course).

Ideally, you start with formulating the ILOs, and based on that choose the content and format of the assessment. Assessment should adhere to the quality criteria for good assessment:

• Validity: do you test what you aim to test (the ILOs for your unit or course)?
• Reliability: is the assessment fair and objective; is the outcome consistent across different conditions of the test, different editions of the test, and different assessors?
• Transparency: is it clear to the students what will be assessed and how, and how the grades will be determined?

When you assess the results of the students, you calculate the score = number of points the student has earned on the test. Please do not subtract points for wrong answers; tests are only for checking whether a student has mastered some knowledge or skills and failing is a first step in learning. Tests are not for punishment.

UT has included in the EER that students with a grade of 6 will pass an assessment. As an examiner, you have to determine which score leads to grade 6 (the caesura). From thereon, you have to determine systematically how the scores on the assessment will be transformed into the other grades. The Examination Board may have instructions on how to do this transformation from scores into grades. The most important thing is that you follow existing rules and can justify why you have chosen a particular method. 

Before you inform the students about their grades, you should do a test analysis at item level to check whether all questions were of the high-quality you intended. This analysis will provide information on the quality of the item or question and how well the score on the question relates to the score on the total test. For example, if hardly any student had the correct answer to a question, that question might be too difficult or the question might have been ambiguous. Or if students score well on the test but very low on an item, you might want to consider deleting this question and recalculating the scores and grades as you do not wish to disadvantage students.

You can use several psychometric data analysis methods for the test analysis, for Multiple Choice examinations, open questions and assignments. If you use digital assessment, systems like Contest, Remindo or Ans automatically calculate these data. The Examination Board might have rules for conducting a test analysis and what to do when certain problematic situations arise. Please check this with your Examination Board !  

After this test analysis, you should calculate all the grades, inform the students of their grades and organize a plenary or individual review session to discuss the test (as mentioned in the EER).

Informing students about your course and the way you assess it is important for transparency. The information about the courses should be available in the (programme-specific part of) the EER of a programme (as mentioned in Art. 7.13.2 WHW and in the EER). UT has indicated in the EER that the following course information should be available in the Osiris course catalogue at least four weeks before the start of the course: the scope, learning objectives and content, language of tuition and assessment, prerequisites, required and recommended study materials, design of teaching methods and assessment. The programme management of your programme will ask you to update the information in time. For clarification: Osiris is used for the formal registration of grades for examinations and some tests and therefore prevails. 

You will have a Canvas site with more detailed information on the course. The course information from Osiris will be automatically transferred to Canvas. An assessment schedule should be added to the Canvas page, at the latest 2 weeks before the start of the course or module (as mentioned in the EER).

The intention of assignments and exams is to stimulate the learning of the students and check whether they have mastered the ILOs. In rare cases, a student might use tools that are not allowed or hand in material that is not their own – behaviour we call fraud. In the Rules and Regulations of the Examination Board, you can find a more detailed description of what is considered fraud.

As an examiner, you should inform the students what behaviour is expected (e.g., when they can and cannot cooperate) and what are allowable tools and materials in your course and the test (e.g. open or closed book exam, use of AI for an assignment). In addition, you should think about what measures you can take to check whether all students adhere to these rules so you can determine when a student has committed fraud (e.g., detect freeriding, and use a plagiarism scanner). A list with suggestions on what you can do to prevent fraud can be found under 'Tools & examples'.
If you think a student has committed fraud, you should inform the student about your suspicions and then inform the Examination Board about your suspicions. The Examination Board will take the necessary actions and will inform you about their decision later. 

Assessments and the results should be archived in a secure location according to the applicable legal rules and regulations. Check with the regulations at the faculty level or your programme management what special facilities or regulations apply for the storage of students’ tests and theses.
Regarding assessments, this applies for example to the exam, student results, exam protocol, answer model, list of attendance etc. 
In addition, theses should be uploaded to the UT repository in order to be publicly accessible.