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Design and validate the assessment regime

A well-designed assessment regime fosters sustained student engagement by carefully considering the number, mode, sequencing, weighting, and timing of assessment tasks and feedback. An effective regime includes early opportunities for students to check their learning progress and receive meaningful feedback that can be applied to facilitate their learning development.

The following will assist you with designing your assessment regime, and validating it before, and after, it is implemented.

Designing the assessment regime

Before you start designing your assessment regime and its various tasks, familiarise yourself with these core elements of a well-designed assessment regime design:

All assessment tasks must align with the unit learning outcomes to provide evidence of student achievement.
- Determine the evidence needed to show that the learning outcomes have been achieved.
- Think carefully about how students will demonstrate their achievement of each learning outcome.
- Once you have planned your assessment regime, go back to the learning outcomes and match each outcome to one or more of your assessment tasks. Not all learning outcomes need to be assessed in every task, but each assessment should align with at least one of your learning outcomes.
Assessment tasks should align with the overall course learning outcomes, and with the graduate attributes of Monash University and other professional requirements.
- Consider where your unit fits in the overall course structure and how it contributes to a cohesive, continuous approach to assessment of student learning over time.
- Mapping unit learning outcomes to course learning outcomes is a robust programmatic approach to curriculum alignment.
By designing a number of tasks, we can provide multiple opportunities for students to receive feedback and demonstrate their learning progress. The Assessment Regime Procedure requires most coursework units to have at least two major assessment tasks. An effective regime also includes early low stakes opportunities for students to check their learning progress and receive meaningful feedback.
It is important to find a balance with an optimal number of assessment tasks that enables regular feedback and opportunities for student development, and avoiding an excessive number of tasks that may impose undue cognitive load and stress on students.
The Monash assessment typology categorises assessment tasks and activities to help educators understand the nature and purpose of various assessment tasks and methods.
The assessment methods you choose should have an educational justification in the context of the unit, course and the professional environment. For your unit, think about setting a range of assessment types to give students opportunities to demonstrate their skills in different environments and conditions.
You should also consider the methods and types of assessment in other units within the course, ensuring an overall mix that demonstrates individual and collaboratively produced outcomes.
Discuss your assessment regime with your colleagues, in order to:
- avoid duplication or over-assessment of a topic or skill
- avoid duplication in the types of assessment tasks set for students
- create synergies between tasks in different units
- Cover course learning outcomes, graduate capabilities, and professional accreditation requirements.
The order in which assessment occurs means that assessment tasks should have a clear relationship to each other. Consider how each task and feedback prepares students for the next set of tasks.
Weighting means that assessment tasks are allocated marks to reflect its relative importance, complexity or significance in the unit.
While some argue that tasks should be weighted by their relative workload such as a word count, this may not always represent what students can do on completion of a unit. Aim to think of assessment workload in terms of volume and depth of learning demonstrated, rather than volume of student expression e.g., word length.
The timing of assessment tasks can impact student learning. Formative assessment tasks are beneficial when they take place earlier in the unit so that students can incorporate feedback and apply it to their subsequent tasks.
When setting the due dates for assessments, consider the students’ workload across the course as a whole. Refer to the student Assessment Timing Tracker to assist with scheduling decisions, as well as current policy on Teaching Period Definitions.
Discuss your unit assessment structure with your colleagues, in order to identify potential issues with student workloads in concurrent units and work placements:
It is also important to consider any assessment conditions , such as:
- The locations that assessments will take place, i.e. do students need to be on campus to complete it?
- The technologies or equipment that may be required for students to complete the assessment tasks.
- To what extent is the use of generative artificial intelligence acceptable.
Each assessment item that is submitted in Moodle needs to have a meaningful name. This name is a required field and has a limitation of 255 characters. The purposes for this name includes: giving students a clear understanding of the task, providing unique names for the Special Consideration system and ease of marking when viewing Gradebook.
Use this naming convention
[Unit code] + [assessment number] + [description]
Examples
ABC1234 Assessment 1 Laboratory report
DEF5678 Quiz 2 Financial knowledge and calculations

Validating the assessment regime

Just as important as the design of your assessment regime is the process of validating it before you release it to students and by reviewing it at the end of the teaching period. Validation, or peer review, ensures your assessment regime is clear to both markers and students.

Validation and review of your assessment regime can be done by sharing it for feedback from:

academic colleagues with experience in assessment regime design
professional staff in teaching support roles
faculty education designers
past students or others who are not in the unit.

The more people you have reviewing your assessment regime, the better.

Reviewers should check the assessment regime for:

the alignment between the unit learning outcomes and the assessment regime
clarity of meaning, language and expression
appropriate timings of assessment tasks across the regime
the weightings of the assessment tasks, and whether they add up to 100%.

A review process should be undertaken again once the teaching period is over, together with reflections on what may need improvement and revision.

Strengthening assessment validity

Rethink how your assessments generate evidence of student learning, and the kinds of inferences you’re drawing from that evidence. Read Identifying what our students have learned: a framework for practical assessment validation to find out more.

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Learning and Teaching: Teach HQ

Learning and Teaching: Teach HQ

Design and validate the assessment regime

Designing the assessment regime

Use this naming convention

Validating the assessment regime

Strengthening assessment validity

Your feedback matters