Flexibility in Assessment

• Allowing students to choose their own deadlines from a set of options or within a set of criteria;

• For an assignment tied to weekly course content, having students choose which week’s content they would like to focus on; and/or

• Creating an online test that can be written over a window of time, offering multiple times to write a test, and/or budgeting significantly more time to write a test than what is generally needed, and giving this extra time to all students.

While the rearrangement of weighting can take some planning and preparation at the outset and while a system is being introduced, it can then become part of a routine and efficient way of steering a course.

Flexibility in weighting might look like:

• Offering several quizzes/tests and dropping the lowest mark from the final grade, providing optional quizzes for students who would like to reduce the weighting of a final exam, or adding the weight from a missed or poorly completed test to the final exam; and/or

• Allowing students the option of completing 2 smaller assignments or 1 larger assignment.

For example:

• Permitting an assignment to be submitted as a written text, podcast, video, or oral conversation (Fuller, Healey, Bradley & Hall, 2004);

• Offering short answer questions as an alternative to multiple choice questions; or

• As Dr. Vanessa Watts describes in this clip, challenging students to design a campaign of their choosing to share what they’ve learned from the course with the broader community.