Summative Assessment

Summative assessments are used to evaluate student learning, skill acquisition, and academic achievement at the conclusion of instruction—typically at the end of a project, unit, course, semester, or program. 
 

Summative Assessment Resources
 

Exam Alternatives

While exams are a frequently-employed summative assessment strategy, many alternatives provide the opportunity for more authentic assessment, better preparing students for the real-world challenges they will face when they complete their degrees. Indiana University Bloomington’s Center for Innovative Teaching and Learning lists some guiding questions to assist faculty to determine exactly the types of skills and knowledge that exam alternatives should address (Indiana University, 2020):

• Do you want to assess your students’ acquisition of specific content knowledge, or their ability to apply that knowledge to new situations (or both)?
• Do you want to assess a product that students produce, or the process they went through to produce it, or both?
• Do you want to assess any of the following?
  •  writing ability
  •  speaking skills
  •  creativity
  •  use of information technology
• Is a visual component to the assessment necessary or desirable?
• Is the ability for students to work in a group an important component of the assessment?
• Is it important that the assessment be time-constrained? 

The Center has compiled a list of alternatives to traditional exams and papers organized by purpose and performance level: creativity, comprehension, analysis or evaluation, short writing activities, and integration of many skills and types of knowledge. 

Exam Alternatives Resources

In addition to those described in the resources for this section, below are a few common alternatives to exams:

ePortfolio

The ePortfolio collects evidence of student learning in electronic form. Because students collect their work over a period of time, ePortfolios are useful in promoting student reflection on their learning over the course of their degree programs and tracking progress toward their academic goals. ePortfolios can be used for both formative and summative assessment.

ePortfolio Resources
 

Authentic Assessment

Internships, capstone projects, service learning opportunities, and other strategies offer learning experiences that combine the benefits of case studies and projects. 

• Case Studies: Long used in business, law, medicine, and the social sciences, cases can be used in any discipline to prepare students to apply what they have learned to real world problems.
• Projects: In project-based learning (PBL), students design, develop, and construct hands-on solutions to a problem. PBL is that it aims to build students’ creative capacity to work through difficult or ill-structured problems, commonly in small teams, and includes these steps:
  •    Identifying a problem
  •    Agreeing on or devising a solution and potential solution path to the problem (i.e., how to achieve the solution)
  •    Designing and developing a prototype of the solution
  •    Refining the solution based on feedback from experts, instructors, and/or peers (Boston University Center for Teaching & Learning, n.d.)
• Student presentations: Student presentations not only assess your students' understanding but also provide the opportunity for students to practice public speaking and presentation skills. Using student presentations as part of a group project requires students to collaborate with peers in synthesizing information and constructing new knowledge. In the remote teaching environment, students can use either Zoom or Kaltura to create their presentations. Zoom works for a group setting if everyone needs to be part of the presentation, and Kaltura is an ideal tool for single-student presentations. 

Authentic/Case/Project/Problem Based Learning Resources

Information Literacy, Research, and Writing Support Available for Students

These resources support students with the types of assignments you might use as exam alternatives.

Competency Based Assessment

Competency-based education focuses on what students know and can do rather than how they learned it or how long it took to learn it (Klein-Collins, 2014). Students advance through their academic programs by successfully demonstrating their skills and competencies through specially designed assessments. 

At the program level,