Maximising student participation in optional assessment

Tony Martin
La Trobe University

Keywords: flexible assessment; student feedback; student participation

This paper outlines an innovative approach to flexible assessment introduced into an undergraduate finance subject taught at an Australian university. Students were given a range of mid-semester assessment tasks and encouraged to attempt as many assessment tasks as possible. An important way in which this was encouraged was by automatically giving students the combination of marks that maximised their final mark. Student feedback, both anecdotal and by way of a feedback survey, was strongly supportive of this approach. Statistical analysis of student results found evidence for statistically significant positive relationships between mid-semester assessment results and final exam results and between the number of assessment tasks undertaken and both exam results and overall final results.