A practitioner reflection and response to students’ perceptions of assessment at Higher Education

Assessments are an integral component of university programmes. They have the formative function of being instrumental in gauging the level of student engagement, whilst also providing opportunity for feedback to enhance students’ learning. Moreover, assessments have the summative function of providing grades on which degree classifications are based. Therefore, it is crucial that assessments are presented in a format that engage students. Listening to the student voice is an essential step in designing appropriate assessments. The aim of this reflection piece is to review and critique how the student voice is captured. While students have various informal and formal opportunities to voice their views, here we chose to focus on processes that result in recorded data, namely, Student Evaluation of Teaching (SET) surveys, Module Evaluation Surveys (MES), and research on students’ experience of assessments. We conclude by outlining an example of our adjustments to assessments, based on the student voice.