This section describes the rules for communicating with students regarding assessment and provides some additional recommendations.
It is important that students are fully aware of the nature of the assessments in your course, so the communication around the assessments should consist of the following stages:
…the more and better you inform students before the exam, the better.
- If students are clear about what is required of them at the end of the course, then those students who can deliver, will deliver. If they are not clear, then luck will decide who meets your criteria and who does not.
- Lack of clarity as to what is involved in assessment is a major source of (unnecessary) student anxiety and contributes a great deal to students reacting negatively to the course (which in turn leads to an unnecessary increase in the teacher’s stress).
The nature of a course’s assessment can be made clear to students in a number of ways, including:
- Students can get a clear statement of what is included in the assessment and the respective weight of each element.
- Students can get a grading grid which clarifies the criteria against which work is marked and how many marks are associated with each criterion.
- Students can get a mock test or a mid-term test, which has the same format or style as the final exam.
- Exercises can include some questions which are in the same format as exam questions. These should be clearly identified to students.
- In the case of projects or coursework, students can be shown examples of good work from previous students. As an alternative, students can be given samples of good, mediocre and poor work and asked to apply the grading grid to them. This will enable students to get an idea about how the grid is actually applied in practice.
Communicating the basic assessment format The basic details of the assessment are included in the course description (fiche de cours). This includes whether it is:
- Session branch or semester branch.
- The form of assessments used (written; oral; coursework).
- The percentage weighting of each component.
The rules set by the teachers for the assessments, including the weight of each assessment for the final grade, should not be modified after the second week of the semestrer, since the students may have already planned their work for the first assessment.
The teacher should make available to students by the end of the fourth week of semester a course exam sheet, which provides more detail on the nature of the assessment(s). This should include:
For written exams
- The exam format (developed solutions, QCM, short answer questions etc.).
- The exam duration.
For oral exams
- The exam format (e.g. is preparation time included).
- The nature of the test tasks (student presentation, resolutions of exercises, conceptual questions etc.).
- The exam duration.
Past exam papers are a useful study tool for students and at least one previous year’s exam question sheet should be made available to students (justifiable exceptions include multiple choice exams, when the exam format has changed considerably, or when the course has been substantially revised). The exam regulations stipulate that for supervised written exams, “new questions must be used for each
examination” (Lex 2.6.1, art. 8.1). There should therefore normally be no practical obstacle to making past exam question papers available to students.
A correction sheet for the previous exam papers is useful for the students but is not obligatory.
For session written exams, at least a week before the exam, the teacher must send an e-mail to students specifying:
- the location and time of the exam,
- the room layout and student placement list,
- the materials students are allowed to have in the exam,
- any other relevant information.
For oral exams, the teacher has overall responsibility for developing the schedule but may delegate this to the class representative(s) (see section 3). The schedule must be communicated to students at least one week before the exam.
After they have been notified of their results, students may ask the responsible teaching staff member to consult their exam scripts within a period of six months following the examination (see Ordinance on the evaluation of bachelor and master studies, Lex 2.6.0.1, art. 15).
The viewing of scripts needs to take place on the Lausanne campus. Please contact your section if you need to book a room for this purpose.
Students must not be able to make changes to their script during the viewing process. Ideally students will get to view a copy of their script (rather than the original). Where students do view the original, viewing of the script must be carefully supervised.
During the viewing session, the teacher does not have to discuss their correction with the student. Such viewing sessions are not primarily intended to be used for discussing a grade. However, if a brief explanation can avoid subsequent formal action on the basis of a misunderstanding, everyone will benefit. If a student does not understand a correction or wishes to contest it, they should follow the procedure for appealing a grade by contacting the SAC (Registrar’s Office) via the Student Services.
Teachers schedule the viewing time within normal working hours, and within a reasonable time period after a viewing request is made. It is possible to schedule multiple students to view a copy of their script at the same time. In large classes, it can be helpful to involve the class representatives in the planning of script viewing.