Abstract

Despite the benefits swift academic progress holds for many stakeholders, there is scarce literature on how academic progress may be improved by changes to assessment policies. Therefore, we investigated academic progress of first-year students after an alteration of characteristics of the assessment policies in three large course programmes: business administration (n = 2048) changed the stakes; medicine (n = 1630) changed the stakes and performance standard; psychology (n = 1076) changed the stakes, performance standard and resit standard. Results indicate that students’ academic progress was sensitive to the characteristics of the assessment policy in all three course programmes. The changes in progress could be explained by differences in performance, as well as by differences in selection for progress by the different policies. Implications are that assessment policies seem effective in shaping student progress, although one size does not fit all.

摘要

尽管快速的学术进步为许多利益相关者带来好处，但关于如何通过改变评估政策来改善学术进步的文献很少。因此，我们调查了三个大型课程项目评估政策特征改变后一年级学生的学业进步：工商管理（n  = 2048）改变了赌注；医学（n  = 1630）改变了赌注和绩效标准；心理学 ( n = 1076) 更改了赌注、性能标准和重设标准。结果表明，学生的学业进步对所有三门课程的评估政策的特征都很敏感。进展的变化可以用绩效的差异以及不同政策对进展的选择差异来解释。这意味着评估政策在塑造学生进步方面似乎是有效的，尽管一种规模并不适合所有人。