Continuous assessments may be supervised examinations of students in class time or unsupervised assessments, where students have access to external information (see Lex 2.6.1, art. 1), for example:
- exercises done at home,
- open-book remote exams,
- coursework
- semester and master projects.
For any classes assessed during the final exam session (“session branch”), teachers can also include continuous assessments as part of the final class grade, but must still give a final exam during the exam session. This final exam must account for a substantial proportion of the overall grade.
For any continuous assessment task:
- The teacher must ensure that the work has indeed been carried out by the student examined and it has not been plagiarised. For further details on EPFL’s plagiarism policy, see go.epfl.ch/plagiat.
- Continuous assessments may include questions that are corrected automatically (such as Moodle quizzes) or questions where the identity of the student answering is not necessarily checked (such as graded exercises), but taken together, these can account for no more than one-sixth of a student’s overall course grade.
- Wherever possible, students should be provided feedback on graded continuous assessment activities in order to be able to improve their performance.
- In the case of group work or team-based assessments, the teacher must ensure that the mark obtained for group work actually corresponds to the work contributed by each student. In case of pronounced differences, the teacher must attribute individually assessed marks.
- Student assistants who are master’s students can correct assignments for bachelor’s classes, provided that the assistant is overseen by a PhD student or the class teacher.
- For coursework that also includes a defence (such as semester projects or Master projects) the nature of that defence is set out in articles 15 to 18 of the directive on examinations.
The assessment method and grading percentages must be specified in the course description.
The following rules apply to coursework conducted during the term. The information provided here is a summary of the rules: for full details please consult the regulations and ordinance on exams in the polylex.
The teacher responsible for the course is also responsible for personally supervising the preparation of the exam material. This includes making sure that confidentiality is maintained during all phases of the assessment development procedure.
New questions must be used each year. Whenever possible, the teacher selects questions requiring detailed answers, in order to make cheating difficult or easily detectable.
The information provided here is a summary of the rules that apply to coursework; for full details please consult the Regulations and Ordinance on exams in the Polylex.
If a student is absent during a test during the semester (e.g. a midterm) and this absence is justified (e.g. with a medical certificate) three solutions exist:
- Where feasible, the teacher should organize a make-up test during the current semester. This is at the discretion of the teacher. The format of the test must remain the same.
- Assign an M to the final result and the student only retakes the missed test(s) the following year.
- Assign a grade of 0 for the missed test and calculate the final result keeping the initial weights.
To be fair to all students, it is not possible to simply ignore the missed test and use only the remaining assessments to calculate the overall grade.
It is not permissible to grade attendance in class; grades can be awarded by evaluating the outcomes of the activities undertaken in class where those activities relate directly to explicitly stated learning objectives in the course description. The students should be aware of the grading criteria and you should be consistent.
Teachers should take all reasonable steps to detect and prevent plagiarism in graded coursework. EPFL uses the iThenticate tools provided by Turnitin. These tools are available via a Turnitin plug-in in Moodle. A guide can be found here: go.epfl.ch/how-to-turnitin.
Combining multiple assessment methods (e.g. oral presentation with project report) is a useful strategy used by teachers to detect potential plagiarism.
In the case of any suspected fraud and/or cheating, the teacher writes a report which they then send to the section director and Legal Service together with evidence of the compromising or suspected item or behaviour.
For further details on EPFL’s plagiarism policy, see go.epfl.ch/plagiat.