Feedback, if given is not timely<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n\n\n\nFor example, if you assess your students with a midterm and a final exam that together yield more than fifty percent of a student\u2019s final grade, even if students complete other forms of assessment, you are using high-\u00ad\u2010stakes assessments because failure on these assessments will certainly result in failure of the course.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
High-stakes assessments are in the news a lot. Standardized tests like the SAT, Virginia\u2019s Standards of Learning (SOL), and the New York Regent\u2019s Exam are high-stakes assessments that can have profound negative effects on students’ lives. These exams have spawned a nation-wide, $4 billion test preparation industry (Wired, 2013) founded on students\u2019 (and their parents\u2019) fear of failure on these exams.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
This is important because fear is a primary motivator for students required to take high-stakes assessments. They will do whatever they need to do to succeed because there is so much at stake. This includes spending $200\/hour on test prep classes, cheating, plagiarism, and cramming, which get them through the exam successfully but may not yield a student who actually knows what the test claims to prove they know.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Engineering students are the second most likely group of students (business students, not a shock, are #1) to engage in cheating (McCabe et al., 2001) primarily because of the discipline\u2019s reliance on traditional high-stakes assessments in combination with the difficulty of the material. If you have doubts about the prevalence of cheating in higher education, read The Shadow Scholar, an article published in the Chronicle of Higher Education.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
High-stakes assessments commonly used in higher education like finals, midterms, term papers, theses, and dissertations are not surprisingly the source of many academic integrity problems.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
High-stakes assessments are also more likely to result in the practice of \u201ccurving\u201d grades, either on the exams themselves or on the students\u2019 final grades. In an applied, competency-based program, like EP, this is seriously negative practice because a student who has earned a \u2018D\u2019 has not achieved mastery, even if that \u2018D\u2019 is changed to a \u2018B\u2019 because the student did better than the average student. The result is a student who does not actually know the material passed forward as \u2018competent\u2019 because they did not fail quite as badly as his or her peers. Grading curves also foster a competitive learning environment as opposed to a collaborative one.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n