Assessment practices in higher education: a case study

Last decades have brought up considerable interest in how students learn, at all learning levels. There has been a shift from characterizing learning as a mere acquisition process to a more actively constructive process. In the former, the teacher is the knowledge's owner, in opposition to the later where students are actively engaged in the acquisition of own knowledge and skills. These changes were accompanied by changes in assessment. From a purely summative practice, characterized by an individual written exam to other forms, including formative with appropriate feedback in which students are continuously aware of their academic progress. It is known that assessment can be used to encourage and boost students' learning [1,2,3]. In this paper, we discuss the results of the implementation of different assessment practices in a Probability and Statistics' course, of a Bachelor's Engineering degree, at the School of Engineering of the Polytechnic of Porto, in three academic years. The teacher responsible for the course wanted to test if students' final grades would be impacted by different assessment practices. Statistical analysis of the students' final grades in the three academic years revealed a decrease in the number of students who failed the course, and the weight of these students with respect to the number of successful ones also lowered. We provide possible explanations for this behavior, highlighting the role of the distinct assessment practices.