Fairness in Assessment

This blog will talk about what ways that I feel is fair to assess children.  I think that there are many different ways that students can be assessed without having to deal with all the excess stress. But it is something that we all have to go through as students and it will be something that we have to face as teacher ourselves, how do we assess our students?  Do we consider how we felt when we were in school and we were given unfair assessments?  I feel that these are tough questions and hopefully we can deal with them in a proper manner and hopefully we can find good and fair ways to assess our students.

I have had teachers assess me very unfairly.  My most recent was a professor who told us that we were going to have a test on all of the poems that we have studied and went over so far.  He basically said to study all of the vocabulary and review all of the poems.  So this is what i had done.  When I walked into the class the day of the test, I felt confident enough to believe that I would be able to pass this test with flying colors.  I sat down and awaited for my test to be handed out to me, when I finally received my test I turned it over and realized that he wanted us to MEMORIZE lines out of the poems.  I started getting really nervous because there was about 10 poems that we had to go over and I did not memorize any of the lines from them because I thought he simply told us to REVIEW and KNOW what the poems were about.  Now of course I still passed the test but not to my full expectations.  I would have liked to get a better grade.  Now for the next test I will know exactly what he means and hopefully I feel more at ease and comfortable enough to actually live up to the grade that I want.

One of the ways that I have been fairly assessed is for example in Dr. Luongo's class.  It was clearly stated what was going to be on the midterm exam and clearly stated how we were going to be assessed.  We were each to have a chapter and make up ONE multiple choice question and ONE essay question, post it and she will use them on the exam.  The one reason that makes this fair is because it is made clear what is going to happen on the day of the exam.  Another example that I have is, in my philosophy class my professor clearly stated that his finals and exams were essays.  This is a fair way to assess students as well because it proves to him that we have been doing the assigned readings throughout the semester and that we have been paying attention to his lectures well enough to write a paper on what we have learned.

Another problem that we have to consider is, making sure that we as teachers grade the students tests fairly and that we do not treat one student better then another.  I am a big believer that all students should get the grade that they earn.  Personally if I were a student who had an answer wrong and it was marked right, I would be very upset, because that is not helping me improve, that will not help me learn and be able to fix a mistake that was made.  So I feel that making sure a teacher grades all the students fairly and giving them the grade that they deserve is very important because if you don't it can affect them in the future.

I hope you all enjoyed my blog on fairness in assessment. =)