Should two modules with the same credit value ask students for the same amount of assessment work? It sounds like an obvious yes. When I became School Assessment Lead for Management and Marketing in January 2024, I decided to check.
The project
5
subject areas audited
22
worksheets across 6 workbooks
1
School assessment policy
What the audit found
I audited postgraduate assessment across five subject areas: management, marketing, business analytics, banking and finance, and international business. The picture was less consistent than anyone expected.
Before
Same credit, uneven effort
Weightings, word counts and notional effort values varied between modules carrying the same credit, often across several assessment components.
After
Two components, comparable effort
Modules moved to two assessment components, with comparable effort expected for comparable credit.
From audit to policy
Rather than propose a fix on paper, I built a common method for comparing student effort across different types of assessment: a word-count equivalence and notional-effort framework.
01 · Audit
Map the evidence
Assessment across five postgraduate subject areas, from 2024.
02 · Test
Work with module leaders
Workshops across all five subject areas to test and refine the method.
03 · Present
School Executive Group
Recommendations presented on 1 October 2024, documented in a ten-part report series.
04 · Adopt
School policy
Adopted following endorsement; in place since Semester 2 of 2024/25.
Why it matters
For students, it means fairer and more transparent expectations. For colleagues, it means a shared reference point when designing or reviewing assessment, rather than starting from scratch each time.
What began as a single audit became a School-wide project. I shared it as a case study at the University of Dundee Scholarship Conference 2025, as an example of how scholarship of teaching can change institutional practice.
The lesson
Start with data, test the method with the people who will use it, and only then propose a policy. Careful, small-scale audits can change more than we expect.
More on assessment
My wider work on assessment includes the CRAFT framework for AI-supported assessment.
