How to Maximise Risks through the Planning Process

Health and Safety:

• It is important to have a rigorous risk assessment document to minimise the health and safety risks that students face. For example, in the level 4 science and materials module, I produced a risk assessment for the laboratory session. I produced this document because it is a legal requirement under the Health and Safety at Work Acts of 1974. The purpose of the planning document is to reduce the risk of the likely hazards the students would encounter during the practical experiments. The hazards, who might be harmed, and safety measures are identified in the document.

Stress on the learner:

• It Is important that during the standardisation process, the tutors meet to ensure that the assessment start and end dates are properly staggered in the assessment plan. This would avoid students having to complete multiple summative assessments in a short period of time. Also, the setting of weekly homework or formative out-of-class assessments for part-time mature students may need to be minimised because of the work and family stress experienced by the students.

Potential for inauthentic evidence:

• To prevent students from colluding with each other or plagiarising others’ works, I ensure Turnitin, a plagiarism-checking tool, is turned on when creating my assignments on MS Teams. Students’ works with an unduly high plagiarism percentage would be flagged by the software, and if collusion is confirmed, the students would face a disciplinarian panel where they would be asked to resubmit their works and their grade would be capped at a pass. Summative assessments of calculation-based units may be done via face-to-face examination. This would prevent students from copying each other’s work, as it may be impossible for Turnitin to check for plagiarism if the assessment is handwritten, scanned, and uploaded as a pdf file.

Fairness:

• I ensure transparency during the assessment process. For example, I provide assignment breakdown documents for all my units. These documents outline the requirements for the pass, merit, and distinction grades. It shows the content area or topics that should be covered for the three grading criteria. This ensures all the students understand the requirements of the summative assessments. Also, in my HNC individual project unit, I ensured I set up a one-to-one tutorial session with all my students. These sessions informed me of areas in which they were struggling, and I provided answers to all their questions as they related to their summative individual projects.

Reference/Bibliography

Akubuilo, F. (2012) ‘Holistic assessment of student’s learning outcome’, Journal of Education and Practice, 3(12), pp. 56–60.

Davies, A. and Stiling, L. (2021) TAQA – training assessment and quality assurance [PowerPoint presentation]. 22 October.

Gravells, A. (2014) Achieving your assessment & quality assurance units (TAQA). 2nd edn. London: Learning Matters SAGE.

The College of Social Work (2012) Understanding what is meant by holistic assessment. Available at: https://www.skillsforcare.org.uk/Document-library/holistic-assessmentASYE1.pdf (Accessed: 11 November 2021).